I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I’m thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?

In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.

  • albiguOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I have a good desktop which I’m thinking of turning into a server, so that sounds like a great idea! I think dwm might run well by itself since LXDE also works nicely right now, but the issue with a GUI is that I also have to rely on the other graphical programs to be efficient to make good use of my limited memory and processing. Also using a touchpad for long periods of time hurts my hand, so I’d rather just avoid clicking/scrolling unless absolutely necessary.

    • ImnecomradeEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I just figured dwm would just make it convenient to use multiple terminal windows if you do not need any GUI applications, and I think zellij (zellij is not built for x86, just amd64) or tmux/screen will work in vt as an alternative.

      • albiguOPEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, I can’t live without tmux already. On second thought I might actually try dwm only so that I can also run some lightweight pdf reader, but I’ll have to see how much better it’ll be than just reading on the phone.

        • nourEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          I found mupdf quite a good PDF reader. Only downside is that it can’t display table of contents.