ASUS Eee PC 1000

VanillaCoffee

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So today I went to the weekend car boot and I picked up an ASUS Eee PC 1000 I have no idea if it works as there was no charger for it, however it looks to be in good cosmetic condition so I took a gamble on it for 7 pounds. When I saw this netbook I thought to myself this could be another Puppy Linux candidate netbook... if it works I'll find out soon enough once I get a charger for it. It takes a 12volt DC supply I do have a HAM PSU I could test this on if only I could find my small bag of laptop charging adapters.

I love old netbooks and laptops and I love talking about them.

The first thing I need to do is see if it powers on and if it does, see if the battery holds a charge. I heard the batteries are very simple and can be re-celled without to much effort on the Eee PC.... I'll post some updates once I can find a way of getting some power into this.

I had a quick peak inside and its fitted with an SSD not sure on the capacity but if its 120GB or more then the 7 pounds I paid was worth it just for the SSD alone, hopefully it works. The RAM is DDR2 probably 1GB, it only has one RAM slot so 2GB would be its maximum.

I'd be interested to hear anybodies input or opinions on the Asus Eee PC 1000
 
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I still have the following in my list of QA test machines

- asus eepc 1000HE (intel atom n270, 1gb, intel mobile 945gse integrated)

My device still has what I consider a good battery (ie. it'll operate for many hours), it was used in QA or Quality Assurance testing of releases up to Ubuntu disco or 19.04 (alpha anyway, or when i386 ISOs were stopped; as my machine was 32-bit x86 only). It has Debian on it now. My only complaint about it in QA was that it wasn't as easy as some devices in booting external media.

I never liked the ~92% sized keyboard - my biggest complaint about the device. I'll grab & take it with me somewhere if I need a device for taking notes or something, as if I lost it I'd not be worried that much about it.

My biggest regret with the device though was I purchased mine with win XP on it... I saw the device (or maybe a 900; I forget) at a local store with Ubuntu available on it; but I didn't know what Ubuntu was; and wasn't sure if I could wipe it & install [Debian] GNU/Linux on it that I wanted, but knew I could overwrite winXP so I purchased the device online & got it with XP.

FYI: I'm a Ubuntu member & involved with the Ubuntu project.. but at that time I was only interested in GNU/Linux & ignored anything that didn't include GNU in the name... Debian GNU/Linux was my wanted OS on it.
 
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what do i know about the eepc 1000
It was introduced in late 2007, it was noted for its combination of Xandros lightweight, Linux-based operating system, solid-state drive, and relatively cheap.
 
I had totally forgot all about XandrOS.... now that is a Distro I've not heard of in a long time... I remember buying that on CD back in 2005 from the computer fair and Back Track Linux was another I got. I totally forgot I had those on CD's not the copy CDs but actual Linux printed CDs with covers containing a small booklet inside like you got with music CDs.
 
I think in terms of upgrades its just the RAM I have a feeling it will have 1024 MB RAM but it may just have 2048 MB of RAM. Its says this model can only support a maximum of 2048MB RAM which is fine but if I can push it and find a 4GB stick of DDR2 RAM it wouldn't hurt to see if it can take 4GB I know 4GB RAM sticks in DDR2 isn't as common as 2GB DDR2 sticks. It be interesting to see and if it don't work then I have other netbooks I could also try it on.

With a 32-bit system I wonder if all 4GB of RAM will be usable with a 32-bit Linux OS?

Of course another thing with RAM is that performance will still be limited by the processor so it could be counterproductive to have more than 2GB RAM on a 32-bit system with a not so powerful processor.

Edit: on second thoughts given the prices on 4GB modules in DDR2 its not worth it so I'll stick with 2GB besides that would be plenty for something like Puppy Linux but if I needed anymore RAM for an application or something... I could always use some virtual RAM on the SSD
 
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If you give it some swap space, (2GB in my case), even a 1GB ram machine could use firefox on the internet, a bit slow, I will admit, but still usable.

You say you'll run Puppy, I've used TinyCore, & even AntiX before on these little netbooks, so you should be fine.
 
I realize 1GB is enough for Puppy but while DDR2 RAM is still cheap I may as well bump it up to 2GB make it a bit more future proof for the next decade. Any old machines I get I will max them out with upgrades.
 
With a 32-bit system I wonder if all 4GB of RAM will be usable with a 32-bit Linux OS?

32-bit i686 on Linux has a 4GB limitation, but i686 with PAE or physical address extensions the same RAM limitation applies to x86_64 & i686 (ie. 32bit data with 64-bit RAM addresses are used with PAE for intel/AMD)

I've used up to 8GB in 32-bit i686 (with PAE) testing, with that limit being the maximum I had in hardware then used in i386 (or what Debian/Ubuntu call all x86 32-bit; i686 in linux terms). Most of my testing is with Ubuntu, but I also used to test Debian.
 
I realize 1GB is enough for Puppy but while DDR2 RAM is still cheap I may as well bump it up to 2GB make it a bit more future proof for the next decade. Any old machines I get I will max them out with upgrades.
Alpine linux will work within very low specs. It has very good documentation and is exceedingly extendable to whatever limits the hardware imposes.
 
Cool I'll give Alpine Linux a spin as well. I like the small Linux Distros the most that run on minimal hardware.
 
Just an update on the ASUS Eee PC 1000 I still haven't managed to find a charger for it but I found a genuine ASUS 12volt charger for a 901 for cheap online that might fit the Eee PC 1000.

Up on very close inspection it looks like the LCD screen may have some liquid damage. its easy to miss but hopefully it should display ok but I probably shouldn't hold my breath on it too much. There are plenty about so I could just buy another for about 20 quid or less in working condition so its not the end of the world if it doesn't work and I'll have some spare parts.
 
What I'm looking to do is fix up a cheap low powered netbook like an ASUS with a long lasting battery that can do basic tasks like browse the web although nothing to heavy like youtube etc and word processing for documents and spread sheets with a light OS like Alpine to carry about with me and the Eee PC 1000 seems to fit this purpose. I'm also a collector of various netbooks/laptops and I love my desktop machines too.
 
Alpine linux will work within very low specs. It has very good documentation and is exceedingly extendable to whatever limits the hardware imposes.
I tested Alpine but I couldn't get past the login and password. I tried root and Alpine but nothing worked.

Edit: I got past it I just tried "root" again after a restart and it worked. but no desktop its just text based. I'll play around with it later and see if I can a desktop environment. I downloaded the x86 version which I might install to an SD Card if possible.
 
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Update on the ASUS Eee PC 1000.

I got some power into it with a 12volt charger at 3 amps but its dead. I got some lights but that was about it. It looks like the main board is dead. Anyway I'll wait for my Asus 12volt charger to arrive which cost me 13 pounds from ebay and try that but its not likely to work.

The person selling it to me kept saying its in working order but no power in the battery and no charger I doubt he even knew if it worked or not or maybe he did know it wasn't working hence no charger and he wanted 15 quid for it but I knocked it down to 7. Oh well it was a gamble and a gamble I lost so this will be scrapped. The SSD is 4GB so probably worth about 2 quid and the RAM is 1GB worth 50p If the keyboard works I could probably salvage that just encase I need one but not likely otherwise the rest will go in the bin where it should have been put in the first place. I will keep the battery.

The charger cost me 13 pounds but that is not going to be wasted because I plan on buying another ASUS Eee netbook for cheap to replace the rubbish I bought from the carboot sale.
 
I tested Alpine but I couldn't get past the login and password. I tried root and Alpine but nothing worked.

Edit: I got past it I just tried "root" again after a restart and it worked. but no desktop its just text based. I'll play around with it later and see if I can a desktop environment. I downloaded the x86 version which I might install to an SD Card if possible.
For a desktop on Alpine, start here: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Desktop_environments_and_Window_managers. If you choose a desktop and follow the link to get the instructions on how to install it, it should be pretty straight forward. One does have to follow links through Alpine docs, so there's a bit of searching at times.

Here's a handbook with lots of links to follow through and build info: https://docs.alpinelinux.org/user-handbook/0.1a/index.html

Here's a master page to link to lots of functions: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Tutorials_and_Howtos. For example, click through on the Xorg link and the info for the GUI is all there.
 
My charger arrived today and unfortunately the laptop isn't turning on but before I write it off I will try get it working again before its scrapped for parts.

Sometimes laptops can get a build up of static inside them and this is resolved by removing the main battery and pushing the power button then releasing it and then clipping the battery back on . This hasn't worked.

The next step is to get some power into the battery, its charging up but the laptop itself wont start, just lights and that is it.

Once the battery in charged up I will try to power the laptop on again and if no joy I will begin some trouble shooting by trying a different stick of RAM and removing the SSD to see if it turns on.

It doesn't look very hopeful as I'm typing this the battery doesn't look like its charging anymore so I will pop the back off and start trouble shooting.
 
With a 32-bit system I wonder if all 4GB of RAM will be usable with a 32-bit Linux OS?

from:

To PAE or not to PAE ; That is the question!

PAE (Physical Address Extension) is a patch to the Linux Kernel. Normally, a 32 bit operating system is limited to “seeing” 4 GB of RAM. When a kernel is configured there is an option to enable higher memory. This switches on the PAE patch and subsequently the operating system is capable of “seeing” up to 64 GB of RAM, however, any one process is still restricted to using up to 4 GB of RAM.

Some 32 bit processors have not got PAE capability set in their instructions. It is a limited few but a notable one is the Intel Centrino with 400MHz FSB. Some quite old processors do not support PAE too.

A similar check to the 64 bit test above can be performed to determine your processors PAE capabily:

grep -o -w -q 'pae' /proc/cpuinfo && echo "PAE Supported" || echo "PAE Unsupported"

This will return PAE Supported if your processor supports PAE; PAE Unsupported if your processor does not.

If you have less than 4GB of RAM there isn’t much point in using a PAE enabled operating system, however in most cases it will work fine anyway.

I have used "Precise Pangolin" Ubuntu Studio LTS with a computer with 4GB RAM. The problem was, I was able to use half of the RAM only, and the rest of it as ramdisk. It was useful though for programs like Audacity with punishing performance. :/
 

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