I found this netbook(?) somewhere in old things and just wonder: can linux be installed on it?
Looks very similar to the Windows CE device action retro has in this video so what he used could be helpful https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=anz17CNMixU
Alpine Linux if ARM7 but it is older arm i think
Well of course you can.
No, you’re not allowed. Now go to your room and think about what you’ve done.
*what you have NOT done.
Fixed that for you
This device should be able to run Linux fine of the specs you provided are correct. You can either use CLI or a Light weight Window manager like IceWM. Web browsing and video playback are out of the question but it most certainly can run vim.
I would just install Debian. It is likely a 32bit machine.
Looks like you already did
Surely its easier to install Linux than android.
I want to know how they put android on it
I mean, the internals might just be the ones of a tablet or something. With android I’d be guessing its an ARM chip
Wut. This thing is like a decade old at least. Did we use ARM back then?
ARM chips were common in phones, even 10 years ago. But after doing a bit of research, there seems to be an unofficial open source version of android made to run on x86. Might be that this thing is running that. No idea, really
Yes you can, it won’t be great though.
I used to maintain a Linux distribution called “OpenWM8650” (back in 2011 / 2012) which was specially aimed at the WM8650 and WM8505. It would run off the SD card. Which wasn’t great, but the flash onboard support was horrible at best.
Maybe you can find some old information on it, on XDA because the website for the initial distribution is long gone.
https://archive.org/details/wm8650-linux It might have been archived here.
Most likely yes, as many others have said. Of course you’ll likely have to pick a very lightweight DE.
As a fallback there is always NetBSD.
NetBSD will not work at all with Broadcom Wireless
I mean if you’re down to NetBSD as your pick you’ve probably already made some big concessions so plugging into Ethernet isn’t a huge leap at that point.
Broadcom makes the wifi
It’s beautiful, pls post an update and ping if you manage it!
It should! As long as you can get it to the bios screen you should be able to get it to boot a live USB. I actually resurrected my EeePC1005 two weeks ago with DamnSmallLinux2024.
The nice thing is that it already runs Linux. The less nice thing is that it’s running some ancient Linux 2.6 kernel with Android on top of it.
It should be doable to install Linux in some form or another onto it, but it won’t be easy like installing Linux on a PC.
Even a potato can run linux if you try hard(er) enough.
Just want to say good luck. Someone brought me one of these and asked to make it ready to be their university laptop in 2013. I worked real hard not to laugh because money was obviously tight but I just told them to return the pos to Amazon.