Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch LinuxReviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux<br>Arch Linux 32 on an Eee PC 1000HE 2026.07.04<br>KO | ENA new operating systemBefore installationPreparing the boot mediaConnecting to the internetSetting the system clockPartitioning the diskInstallationSystem configurationBootloader configurationNetwork configurationAfter installationArch User RepositoryDesktop environmentRAM upgrade<br>I still have a netbook I bought back in 2009.The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE has an Intel Atom N280 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Atom N series was Intel’s line of cheap, low-performance CPUs for netbooks. The chip has 56KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, and its clock speed is 1.667GHz. Compare that with the Intel Core i3 N305, a budget laptop processor released in 2023, which has 768KB of L1 cache, 4MB of L2 cache, and runs at 3.8GHz, and you get a feel for how poor the Eee PC’s performance is.Those were the kinds of compromised specs that came with being a netbook, so there is not much point in complaining about how bad they were. Even at the time it was no match for a laptop, but it was still fine for light work like editing documents or browsing the web. By around 2012, though, it had become hard to use even for routine tasks. Programs kept gaining features, websites kept growing more interactive, and the netbook’s small HDD was aging. In the end, ultrabooks replaced netbooks.And so the netbook went to sleep in storage.A new operating system<br>More than ten years later, in 2023, I suddenly thought of the netbook again. The machine I pulled out of storage looked exactly as it had when it went in, and the tacky Windows XP UI that appeared after booting was just as I remembered it. It took several seconds just to open Windows Explorer, and the cursor stuttered while it loaded. I could not remember whether the machine had gotten even slower, or whether it had always been like this and I had once thought even this was fast. Once the netbook was out of storage again, I decided to bring it back to life and put it to use again, whether as a server or a YouTube machine.My first thought was that Windows XP, whose support ended in 2014, had to go. Windows releases after Windows 7 required at least 1GB of RAM. Because the netbook had exactly 1GB of RAM installed, I figured I would need a lighter operating system if I wanted it to be pleasant to use. Ubuntu required at least 512MB of RAM, but when I had installed Ubuntu on low-spec laptops in the past, I had not found the performance especially good.I needed an extremely light operating system with only the bare minimum. It had to come without unnecessary default features, and it had to let me build an environment from the ground up for this netbook alone. The answer was obvious. Arch Linux. Arch Linux is a Linux distribution built on the principles of simplicity, modernity, pragmatism, user centrality, and versatility. I had wanted to try Arch Linux for a while anyway, so it felt like a good chance. The fact that the setup process would teach me a lot about operating systems also made it a nice hobby to start right before the semester began.Before installation<br>Arch Linux officially dropped support for the x86 architecture after 2017. The Atom N2xx processors support only 32-bit, so I had no choice but to use Arch Linux 32, which is maintained by the community. The installation process for Arch Linux 32 was not very different from the Arch Linux installation guide on the ArchWiki, but the machine’s limited performance led to some unexpected twists. In this article I want to record, in detail, my personal experience installing Arch Linux 32 on this netbook.Preparing the boot media<br>First, I needed an Arch Linux disk image. On the Arch Linux 32 download page, I downloaded the image file (.iso) and the signature file (.sig), then used the gpg command to verify that the image had not been tampered with.$ gpg --keyserver-options auto-key-retrieve --verify archlinux32-2023.03.02-i686.iso.sigIf everything checks out, create the boot media. I used Rufus on a Windows desktop to burn the ISO file I had downloaded to a USB drive. I then plugged the USB drive into the netbook, entered the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), set USB as the first boot option, and rebooted. That makes the computer boot from the USB drive instead of the hard disk.Connecting to the internet<br>The Arch Linux installation image uses zsh as its default shell. To install Arch Linux, the machine needs an internet connection. First check whether the network interfaces are up.$ ip link<br>1: lo ... state UNKNOWN ...<br>link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00<br>2: enp3s0 ... state DOWN ...<br>link/ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff<br>4: wlan0 ... state UP ...<br>link/ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ffHere lo is the loopback interface. The loopback interface is a virtual network interface the system uses to connect to itself. The IP address 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address assigned to...