Put Linux on It

I bought a netbook, probably in the first part of 2009, to serve two purposes: 

1. Dedicated writing machine that didn’t have the distractions of my gaming PC.
2. Email and social media receiver while traveling. (It may not surprise you to learn that I was a late smartphone adopter.) 

A friend and I went to a computer supercenter to try out a few flavors of netbook, and this one won out for its satisfying keyboard (considering the 8.9” size), long battery life, and general aesthetics. 

I got it a little sleeve. A former employer periodically handed out miniature USB mouse devices as swag, so I had (and still have) some appropriately small-scale peripherals to use with it. It was cheap and adorable and hard to break, but eventually I was issued a work laptop and smartphone and didn’t use it anymore. The excellent battery makes it heavy. 

In the early days of being in my house all the time this spring, I dug it out of a tote bag that has hung more or less undisturbed on a hook on the back of my home office door for several years and fired it up, out of curiosity and a desire to not spend money on a new dedicated writing device. 

After some time charging, it booted slowly but otherwise as expected.

My Acer Aspire One’s system details:

• Hard drive: 150 GB 
• CPU: Intel Atom Processor N270 @ 1.60 GHz
• RAM: 1 GB
• Webcam: 1.3 megapixels
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002 Service Pack 3

Windows XP, it turns out, reached its end of support on April 8, 2014, so I could update none of the software (web browser, antivirus, whatnot) on this device. And worse (for me, if not for my security), every action was harrowingly slow, even compared to my old Windows 7 workhorse desktop from 2010. 

(Support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020, in case you were also curious. I replaced that desktop in February.)

So the netbook was not going to work in its current state. Work friends proposed that I put Linux on it. 

Putting Linux on a thing is surely my ticket to some sort of nerd merit badge, so I looked at some resources:

1. The DistroWatch sections specifically for Beginners and Old Computers 
2. 8 Lightweight Linux Distros Ideal for Intel Atom Processor PCs

The basic plan: strip the netbook of anything I needed, use a modern computer to create a Linux-bearing USB boot drive, then replace Windows XP on the netbook with the contents of that boot drive.

With some patience and some swearing, I moved all my old files full of scraps of terrible writing (mainly .txt and .rtf files, as I’d been cheap broke thrifty and used open source word processing in the 2009–2011 time period during which the device saw semiregular use) onto a Google drive, so that someone can be properly appalled when I die and they inherit my accounts.

A couple of months went by, as I kept forgetting to pick up a USB drive when I was out. Wrote carefully on my shopping list that I needed a USB drive of at least 2 GB. It had been long enough since I acquired a USB drive that I didn’t realize that the smallest one a popular big box retailer would even have was 16 GB. I bought one with 32 GB; it was less than $10. 

Then I was back at the point of not knowing which one of the dozens of lightweight Linux distributions would be “better,” having really no frame of reference. Found some folks who had done just about exactly what I was planning to do with Linux Mint, so that seemed like an option as good as any.

Once I’d settled on Linux Mint, I downloaded Xfce because the netbook is underpowered and 19.3 because it has a 32-bit option, which the current version (20) does not have. The version I downloaded is named “Tricia.” Used the Harvard Engineering download mirror, because that sounded reliable. It took about 20 minutes to download. I took a walk.

I lost the thread of what I was doing and a couple of weeks went by. Then I verified the ISO I’d downloaded, which is not something commercial software had ever encouraged me to do.

The very fine Linux Mint Installation Guide explains how to verify your new Linux ISO using…Linux, which I did not yet have, so on their suggestion I turned to the tutorial for Windows. 

Adhering strictly to the tutorial, I confirmed that the ISO passed the integrity check. The verification files don’t have to be in any particular folder, they just have to be in the same folder, and you have to open PowerShell there.

For the authenticity check, I got a successful result from the second variant provided in the tutorial and then the desired Good signature from “Linux Mint ISO Signing Key <root@linuxmint.com>” response and the matching key. Good job, Harvard Engineering.

Learned (happily before taking any action) that one does not simply paste an ISO onto a USB drive and go forth, so I went back to the Linux Mint Installation Guide to create the bootable medium. They recommend using Etcher, so I did that. 

The 32 GB USB drive I got operates with a clever dial mechanism that spits out the actual USB part, and it took my monkey hands a few minutes to figure out how it goes. You put your thumb and index finger firmly on either face of the dial, then rotate either the dial or the drive until it clicks open.

With my now-bootable USB drive in hand, it was time to boot. Hit the power button, hit F2 for startup options before it could boot into Windows. Changed the boot priority order to make the USB stick #1. 

The netbook didn’t like booting on the first try (it flashed two errors about something already existing), but on the second it was fine. Verified that I could still connect to Wi-Fi in the live session that launched. Mint came with Firefox.

Double-clicked the icon on the refreshingly empty desktop to install the OS to the hard drive. Enabled Install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and so on because I didn’t want to mess with anything I didn’t have to. Selected the option to Erase disk and install Linux Mint, because one OS was already too much. Did not encrypt the installation, because even the documentation said it could cause problems. Did not choose to manage partitions myself. Did encrypt my home folder, though I have had cause to regret this as I had to enter my password about 50 times during configuration.

Went through the little welcome slideshow while the installer was running. From purely aesthetic grounds, why can Microsoft not hire designers who are as good as the ones making Linux Mint for free?

Booting from the hard drive after removing the USB drive resulted in the display suddenly losing power every few seconds at first, with the green power button light changing to slow-flashing red as if it had gone to sleep. Hitting Enter woke it up, though I had to log in again. Boot progress wasn’t lost, so I shrugged it off. 

As with any software, as soon as I got back on the Wi-Fi there were updates ready to download. You get to pick the updates you want; I picked all of them the first time but likely won’t do that again. 

When the updates finally churned through I set up snapshots and the firewall, and then I had a functional netbook again.

This is where I would like to have a rousing conclusion about how Linux rules and I don’t need to buy a new personal laptop after all. 

The first point might very well be true; I haven’t used it enough to have an educated opinion yet. It certainly looks very nice and cuts out a lot of the overstimulation that I find exhausting on my desktop. It’s much more secure than when it was running Windows XP, it boots noticeably faster, and I paid $0. I’ve experienced the narcoleptic lost-display issue several more times so far, sometimes in the middle of typing in my password, and it is very annoying; others have reported it as well. It seems like it would bear some more looking into, but I probably won’t get around to that soon.

The second point is sadly not true, which was apparent as soon as I logged into my Google account and everything miserably bogged down. In our current worldscape I need something not owned by my employer on which I can type into the cloud and stream a video and show a reasonable facsimile of my human face to my friends while I move around the house. Even with Linux, the modern internet is just too much for my little blue friend, so it’s not the solution I was hoping for. 

It would probably still be good for learning programming offline or hosting a Commodore 64 emulator, though.

I would not necessarily call this a fun experiment, but it was invigorating to set out to do something I had no idea how to do and figure out how to do it. I will take my merit badge now.