I'm fascinated by these explorations into obsolete tech. I wouldn't have near enough patience to fiddle with this stuff on my own.

@calistheticsmurdergeese

Жыл бұрын

I can see about 6 uses for one of these in my daily life. Doesn't seem obsolete to me if thats a thought in modern day.

@Pusingoding

Жыл бұрын

Steam deck is handheld too, its no obselete. The device is old tho

@calistheticsmurdergeese

Жыл бұрын

@@Pusingoding meh, and? Needs better software

@redjoker07

Жыл бұрын

​@@calistheticsmurdergeese there are always alternatives

@DJDanceClassic

Жыл бұрын

this is how we boomers have lived in the IT world 30 years. You millennials are lucky to have USB 3.0 and HDMI and wifi. we did not have that in the 80s, 90s and 00s

This is hacking in its purest form. No BS advertisement or filler content. Amazing video, mate.

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

hey thanks!

@alexisg311

Жыл бұрын

Excellent work. Thank you so much.

@Lovingisnecessary

11 ай бұрын

I would not consider what he did here to be hacking. He used MAME and that was already precoded for him. So he didn't adjust anything with the program outside of it's normal parameters. I could have done what he did here without having to learn anything, but what he did here to get the OS to run faster and that was the adjustment he made by switching to a more basic UI that I was unfamiliar with that he used instead of the original interface for Debian 11.

@EXIT_FAILURE

11 ай бұрын

@@Lovingisnecessary Hacking has a much broader meaning that predates software. And regarding your claims of hacking prowess, I'd love to see it in practice. Eagerly waiting for your videos!

@user-dz3sq9bf6s

6 ай бұрын

@@JanusCycletry emulator

For a lightweight DE, you may want to try LXDE or LXQT. LXDE is what Lubuntu used to use back when it still supported 32-bit computers, and it uses LXQT in modern versions. Onboard is an onscreen keyboard which should work with MATE (and LXDE).

@TheGuyWhoIsSitting

Жыл бұрын

Would xfce not work for this case?

@steriftes

Жыл бұрын

​@@TheGuyWhoIsSitting lxcute lighter

@SonicBoone56

Жыл бұрын

@@TheGuyWhoIsSitting Xfce would work fine too

@aaronandrews5648

Жыл бұрын

@@TheGuyWhoIsSitting The problem with xfce is that it is surprisingly heavy when actually running on really under-powered hardware lxqt or better yet going with a standalone window manager provides a considerable performance difference on XP devices I have firsthand suffering and experience running my Gateway LT2016U and forcing upon modern workloads with a demand to get things done fast because I refused to use the school computers🫠

@p3nguin-kun

Жыл бұрын

window manager is better

your videos have revived my obsession with 2000s era pocket-sized computers. as a young teenager i was convinced we'd all be carrying these around in 10 years... almost, but not quite) bought a vaio VGN-P70H from japan to play with. i want to rebuild a battery pack for it and see how far we can carry it. thanks for the content! only 46k subs is insane oh, also! consider XFCE on weaker systems. it's highly flexible.

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

Nice, I've always been curious about that model. I hope you enjoy having and doing something with it!

@rylanramirez6405

Жыл бұрын

I second XFCE

@loganmacgyver2625

Жыл бұрын

Kinda still wish we had pocket desktop OSes today. there are linux ports for mobile phones but not for every phone

@faequeenapril6921

Жыл бұрын

Your story reminds me of my time in secondary school, in 2004 in design and tech we had to design a MP3 player and at the time my dad had one of these pocket computers for his work and I loved them so I designed an MP3 player that was touch screen with small bezels and everyone criticised my design saying no one is gonna want a "big" MP3 that's touch screen....then a few years later iPhone happened...

@Tibyon

Жыл бұрын

Xfce is lightweight but still looks great!

A small update on Plop. While Plop can run from floppy disk and detect USB devices, I have not been able to boot any ISOs, either Windows or Linux. Plop just freezes up when attempting to boot from USB. However I have found that Plop can boot the fractal bootsector from USB. So it can execute a USB bootsector after booting from floppy disk. I don't know why it won't boot any ISOs. Plop is still awesome and I want to learn more about it. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong here and gave up too easily when I received the i-Link DVD drive.

@jordanb2812

Жыл бұрын

Have you tried loading Ventoy using Plop, and using that to load ISOs? Might be a roundabout way to do it, but I've heard of worse.

@LeeZhiWei8219

Жыл бұрын

Maybe try rufus to write the ISO images onto the USB?

@resneptacle

Жыл бұрын

​@@LeeZhiWei8219Or DD them over

@manitoba-op4jx

Жыл бұрын

it would have been awesome if you installed the KDE plasma desktop instead of gnome and used the personalization to make it look like windows XP again.

@Aeduo

Жыл бұрын

If I had to guess, however plop is trying to emulate BIOS services for USB disk access just isn't working on that device and bootloaders are just crashing because they can't load past their first 512 bytes of code, or even plop itself is crashing trying to access the USB media to load the initial boot record.

XP doesn't like booting via USB. They rewrote the bootloader and changed how windows is installed when Vista came along however.

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

I have experienced these XP USB boot troubles before. It takes a lot of effort to pull it off.

@vincentschumann937

Жыл бұрын

one tool that helped with windows xp on usb is easy2boot, has a 2 step boot sequence for before and after the automatic reboot that happens in the xp setup

@lucasrem

Жыл бұрын

cheap chipsets !

@RaduTek

Жыл бұрын

I've been really lucky with my old machines as they all boot just fine from USB. I've also never had issues with Rufus made XP USB installers.

@dcfuksurmom

Жыл бұрын

@@JanusCycle if you use rufus it should work, ive never had an issue with an xp usb made with rufus

If you want to have a lightweight desktop environment, I recommend XFCE, LXDE or LXQT. Also the reason the brightness didn't change was because you were on the "AC power" tab. Edit: If you count window managers as well, IceWM (but harder to set up than desktop environments but it's lighter than the others). Also for a virtual keyboard try xvkbd or matchbox.

@drakeerv

Жыл бұрын

well said

@Willeexd1337

Жыл бұрын

This ^^

@anstropleuton

Жыл бұрын

Agreed

@KettLovahr

Жыл бұрын

The moment he said "GNOME" i audibly let out a "oh no", I was surprised it even ran at all

@geordan6740

Жыл бұрын

​@@KettLovahr haha same

Awesome video. Right to the point within the first few seconds. No sponsorships, no plugs. Subscribed.

@JanusCycle

5 ай бұрын

Great to hear, thank you.

Great video! For the USB boot problem, you could try something like GRUB4DOS which is a version of the GRUB bootloader that I've actually used to get systems to boot from things other than the floppy drive. You basically just create a DOS boot disk and then copy the GRUB4DOS binaries over to it and run it like any other program under DOS. You might have to do quite a bit of setup in DOS to get the CD/DVD drive or USB drive detected, though, depending on whether or not the system's BIOS just passes it through like a drive. You might also be able to use a slightly newer version of FREEDOS that has better USB support instead of using something like MS-DOS. Once you get GRUB4DOS running, though, it's as simple as booting any Linux or Windows install from the GRUB prompt, and there's extensive documentation about how to do that manually online.

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

I really like this suggestion, thanks. I did wonder about using DOS and DOS USB drivers. But I wasn't sure how that would work with booting ISOs.

@xXRedTheDragonXx

Жыл бұрын

@@JanusCycle It might work! GRUB4DOS has a feature that lets you load a bunch of ISOs on a device and boot directly from the file without having to burn it to a drive, but support for that is usually limited to newer devices, and it only works with certain ISOs. If you're just trying to boot from a burned disk when you can only boot floppy disks, though, it should work!

@eDoc2020

Жыл бұрын

Modern GRUB2 has native disk support than can be loaded. If you can get enough of GRUB stored on the floppy to load the native USB drivers it should work well. Downside is once you load USB support the BIOS' driver for USB keyboard won't work. If the bootloader's USB support does not recognize keyboards this will make you tablet without internal keyboard rather difficult to use.

@willkrummeck

Жыл бұрын

@@eDoc2020 yeah so the issue with the usb is driver?

You definitely can make a USB stick that presents itself as a floppy. Some USB flash drive controllers can be reflashed with vendor tools. And those tools often allow you to set things like "read only" flags, or whether the drive presents itself as a flash drive, CD, or even a floppy disk.

@guerrillaradio9953

9 ай бұрын

Good idea. Another method that's worked well for me is using extremely cheap (no controller) USB to MicroSD adapters with a good quality MicroSD card which I can then format/disguise however I wish.

This was very relaxing to listen to while I was doing other chores. Love this format and your style of presentation.

This is fantastic! As a Linux nerd I love seeing others go out and learn about how Linux works and the various options for distros we have. You have a great open mindset and you've motivated me to go fix up my (formerly favourite) laptop from 2012!

@JanusCycle

6 ай бұрын

I also tried installing Linux on a Fujitsu Windows 7 phone in one video. That was a fascinating experience from which I learned a lot. I'm going to end up with an odd set of Linux knowledge this way :)

@thenoddingturtle

5 ай бұрын

@@JanusCycle The best kind of knowledge. Being able to eventually solve problems without searching the web is the most rewarding computing experience for me. I use Arch, by the way.

I prefer the furry CAT cable 😆

@stavinaircaeruleum2275

Жыл бұрын

UwU

@ordinarryalien

Жыл бұрын

​@@stavinaircaeruleum2275 Don't UwU at me. 👾

@Unicorn7_

10 ай бұрын

@@stavinaircaeruleum2275 👾

@KorbAgain

9 ай бұрын

You like furry cats, don't you? You catliker

@FloofyLuna

9 ай бұрын

​@@KorbAgain;3

If you are willing to sacrifice usability for performance i recommend AntiX distro. It’s based on debian but it’s tailored towards very old machines like this one. It’s desktop uses 100mb of ram and it has non-pae kernel by default so there is no need for forcepae flag. It’s desktop however takes some getting used to as it’s not much of a desktop like gnome or mate but a choice of a window manager with seperate utilites for configuring things like internet connection and volume to name a few.

@RogerioPereiradaSilva77

Жыл бұрын

AntiX is surprisingly easy to get used to as long as the user sets his/her expectations accordingly. I have an old Asus EeePC netbook running on AntiX and while it is no speed demon, it is still being put to good use; it is used to watch IPTV up to 720p (through VLC), KZread (through SMTube) and to play lullabies music (through Audacious) to my baby son. It can't browse the web very well - today's websites with boatloads of Javascript frameworks and TLS everywhere are too much for these puny Atom CPUs - but can do most other tasks just fine.

@ylajodiste1

Жыл бұрын

Yes, I installed Antix on an really old notebook with 256mb ram, instead of xp, it works perfect

@mardus_ee

Жыл бұрын

​@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 It's not because the CPU is old, but usually due to insufficient RAM memory.

@AgeofReason

Жыл бұрын

THANK YOUUUUUU

@AgeofReason

Жыл бұрын

F system.d

Your channel has become a source of joy for me. I love the topics you cover, from old gadgets and Vantage phones to Linux systems, MS-DOS, and serial communication. I'll definitely spread the word about your channel!

@JanusCycle

Ай бұрын

I really appreciate your support. You are a true friend of this channel.

Idk why but all of ur videos just makes me feel chill and all the systems u try to build remembers to me my childhood days thakns for thoose please keep doin this kind of contents Respects from Türkiye

This sort of thing was actually fairly common back in the 90s & early 00s and having a linux floppy around and knowing how to set up chain-loading with GRUB was very handy.

I love the tidiness of that little device. So efficient, so compact.... for it's day that is.

I'm really liking your videos. Running the game & watch games was a stroke of genius. Subscribed!

@JanusCycle

11 ай бұрын

Thank you, I hope you enjoy the channel.

Impressive as usual and I always learn something. Cheers mate.

This looks a decent device to try retroarch on, taking that overhead of the OS out would certainly improve performance. Pretty crazy Sony built something that's still kicking 20 years later.

@BeDisruptive

6 ай бұрын

Not surprised Sony was trying to limit you running Other OS's 20 years ago

@Vespyr_

6 ай бұрын

Sony was a different company then. They made things that last. Especially audio hardware.

Nothing from the VAIO line ever seems to look dated, you gotta tip your hat to the people who designed the aesthetics. I mean, if the motherboard and LCD in that tablet was switched out for something new then nobody would be the wiser, it would seem as if it was manufactured today.

@lucasrem

Жыл бұрын

i love their outdated styles a lot, if you do a good design, it will never be outdated. everything is crappy about it, the screen, the OS, the Pentium M etc. Next to the iPhone original, it's very OLD and slow !!!

@jnharton

Жыл бұрын

@@lucasrem I would actually argue that nothing about it is crappy, at least in an /objective/ sense. That we have something thing better now means only that the older thing is /subjectively/ worse at the same tasks. Real crappiness comes from poor quality components and bad design choices. Truly awful products are usually markedly inferior when they're brand new.

@lucasRem-ku6eb

Жыл бұрын

@@jnharton Nobody needed it, the Windows CE and Pentium M gear was crap. only apple could do this, UNIX on ARM !

@jnharton

Жыл бұрын

@@lucasRem-ku6eb Found the Apple fanboy! -- Apple has produced some amazing products, but that's doesn't mean everything else is trash.

@EmergencyChannel

11 ай бұрын

Windows XP tablets were around years before the Iphone. The Iphone didn't even have the app store for a year after launch, so it was extremely limited compared to a Windows tablet that could run all windows compatible software.

These tablets are wild! Keep making more of these videos!

Wow -- this is video is a real voyage of discovery. Taught me a lot about the speedbumps and hurdles in reviving old computing equipment (or even certain modern things) that doesn't want to install GNU/Linux the modern way -- from this one video. Great work. Sub.

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

Glad you enjoyed the experience :)

I just found your channel yesterday, and after watching a video about Nokia hacking I realized how much content you have and now I'm all giddy with excitement :) The stuff you cover is right down my alley, and the voicing and editing of your videos has me vibing in all the good ways! 👍

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

I really pleased to hear this. I hope you enjoy the videos. Thanks for letting me know :)

Have you thought about trying AntiX on there? It's a Debian based distro specifically designed for very low end systems that might work a little better on there.

Awesome work, it was relaxing to watch you work through getting Linux on this device :)

6:12 beautiful selection of hardware for the burning process 🤣🥰

@JanusCycle

6 ай бұрын

:)

Another wee comment after watching: I recognised that Aquatic Ambience cover just from the opening chords! Though of course you played more of it at the very end.

in regards to touchscreen support, GNOME + Wayland in all of its bloated glory is sadly the best option the default onscreen keyboard is pretty barebones and useless, but installing the 'Improved OSK' extension makes it quite usable

@Madwonk

Жыл бұрын

that, or a lightweight wayland GUI like Phosh or Sxmo

@ccricers

Жыл бұрын

I guess maybe a tiled window system like i3 could work too. Especially if you can map the physical buttons to switch windows

@Madwonk

Жыл бұрын

@@ccricers I've done a similar setup on some embedded ARM devices- run the dock with the right configuration and it can be an easy app launcher. (Having SSH enabled helps a lot because you can remotely debug!)

@maxpoulin64

Жыл бұрын

Wayland is really great for touch support, it's very unfortunate it basically means you need OpenGL or Vulkan. It's plain better for current hardware, but this device needs a good old Xorg DDX to take advantage of the same 2D acceleration Windows would use to keep the desktop responsive when dragging windows and stuff.

@AyaKho

Жыл бұрын

KDE + Wayland + Maliit Keyboard is *by far* the best option for Linux on desktop touchscreen. Gnome is a seamless experience until it is time to type anything.

6:15 gotta love that 'donkey kong country aquatic ambience' song in the background!

Your video quality is phenomenal!

Very nice video, i've had a soft spot for these mini PC's for a bit now, and it's quite interesting to see how they all go on about making a tiny PC. the motherboard not taking USB boot is quite normal, especially for early Windows XP systems. You may want to look for a BIOS update for it (If Sony still has support documentation for it) As for the Linux desktop, i'd recommend XFCE or LXQt, very light desktops (300-400mb of RAM usage on 64-bit, may be lower with 32). bare Debian is a great choice btw.

excellent, more ancient tech! clicked as fast as i could. Love this stuff

Very fascinating find, I enjoyed this showcase.

1:31 this floppy driver's sound is definitely JUICY

That thing looks like a prop computer from a movie about the near-future

You are the first person ever I've heard liking the Debian installer

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

I like the simplicity and directness of the text mode installation. It provides the feel of getting the job done without the fuss.

@eDoc2020

Жыл бұрын

Then I call second. Why _wouldn't_ anybody like it? maybe if you only like shiny GUIs.

Excellent work, thank you very much.

i had goosebumps from this video. god i miss this struggle with modern gadgets=) sounds of the old tech just calms my mind=)))

@JanusCycle

6 ай бұрын

Yes, I've been making even more effort to capture the sounds recently.

Woo! First new video since I caught up with your portfolio! It’s kind of odd that it will boot off of a USB floppy but nothing else. They must’ve hard-coded USB floppy support into the BIOS or something… might have seemed appropriate for 04 when thumb drives were still pretty small, but c’mon Sony!

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

It's very weird how they limited the USB boot. But this was 2004 and USB was weird then. Many phones that had USB ports couldn't charge from USB. You had to use a separate port and proprietary connector to charge.

@kaitlyn__L

Жыл бұрын

@@JanusCycle for sure, I’m accustomed to None USB boot in this era. (Or custom openfirmware commands because it’s not built in.) So it’s that contradiction, they built just enough USB boot for their floppy drive (which worked the same as most others) and no further. Even though that’s like 80% of the way there! I’d only really ogled Vaios in life, and experienced Sony mainly through their A/V stuff, at the time. So I’d always assumed they were more forward-looking than other PC manufacturers. I’m starting to learn it’s more they liked to bundle quirky features for the day, but they had just as much of a bloatware and half-baked solutions problem as anyone!

@kudryavchik

11 ай бұрын

Its a Sony limitation. Old VAIOs (before 2006), by Sony politics, must have been booted only from Sony CD drives, and their CD drives before 2006 were PCMCIA or iLink.

@TrimeshSZ

5 ай бұрын

No, it's honestly exactly what you would expect - the original V1.0 USB mass storage device interface basically provided a block device driver, but it was up to the code using it to make sense of it. If you were using it with an already booted OS, this worked fine - the OS already knows how to handle block devices. It also supported a USB floppy interface, which operated at a significantly higher semantic level than the rest of the block device support did and provided enough context so that the OS could boot from it, but obviously only supported floppy discs. This was quickly identified as a weakness of the spec, and work started on generalized bootable device support for USB mass storage devices. The original release of this spec was in late 2004, so early 2006 is going to be about the earliest it was going to start appearing in products. Of course, there were bootable USB devices before that (for example, Toshiba were doing boot from USB CDs in about 2001) - but that was of necessity using non-standard protocols, since there weren't any standard ones at that point. @@JanusCycle

You can actually enable a on screen keyboard in xfce but you’d probably need to bind it to one of the buttons which will either be done using the settings menu or you might have to use xev and manually edit the config file

@csehszlovakze

Жыл бұрын

have onboard autostart then you can show/hide by clicking on its tray icon

New subscriber here, just wanted to say your content is fantastic! I'm in the process now of binging every video you've put out, please don't ever stop!

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

Thank you, I'll keep doing my best!

I love this kind of stuff. Thanks for sharing

I was somehow thinking you'd try an era-appropriate distro release, but you actually installed something modern. Whoa. I have a ThinkPad R51 running Debian 8, and on that, GNOME 3.14 ran slowly, i never tested Plasma, but XFCE, MATE, FVWM, and Trinity ran decently on that.

@bugraosmansoysal9118

Жыл бұрын

I think icewm can be a better match for it. Plasma is lighter than GNOME but still heavier than XFCE

@kbhasi

Жыл бұрын

@@bugraosmansoysal9118 Oh! I forgot that I also had IceWM on that install and it ran decently fast!

@bugraosmansoysal9118

Жыл бұрын

@@kbhasi there is no hardware exists that cant run icewm on it :D

@Biaanca5036

3 ай бұрын

Old programs are so fast! Except web browsers . . running a modern browser is like trying to run crysis on a phone 😶 So what I did is I got xrdp working *with audio* on a more powerful computer and then I just use remote desktop to get onto the internet

I remember going to Fry’s and trying this series of Sony vaio, very novel back then. Didn’t some of the Sony vaio come with a file explorer software called “visual flow”, or something like that. Would allow you to interact with your mounted drives displayed as a helix you could “explore”, if that makes any sense? 😅 great video!

I was thinking it looked like a game&watch while you were troubleshooting the boot issues... Great project and video!

David Wise's music fits so well on here. Great video.

Awesome video! GNOME is probably the best bet for touchscreen support, sadly. Though, while it is very technically complicated, switching to Gentoo and running GNOME on top may provide just enough performance. With Gentoo you can target the specific CPU when compiling all the packages and strip out anything you're not going to use to save RAM. It may provide just enough performance boost to maybe make it a bit more usable! Plus it'd probably make for a great video :) Love watching people install Gentoo on odd hardware (WindowsG Electronics has installed Gentoo on some older PowerPC Macs, for example)

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

Do you mean also compiling the whole kernel from scratch? I've never tried that before, but if something's worth doing then . . :)

@CyberKitsune09

Жыл бұрын

@@JanusCycle Yeah! I personally have never done it as the performance gains on modern hardware are usually too small to justify the effort personally, but on older hardware you can throw out support for anything not needed for your machine, and I’d imagine it’d save a lot of memory! I’m sure a kernel configuration guru more skilled than myself could probably help advise what options to set 👀

@GamingWithUncleJon

Жыл бұрын

​@@JanusCycle The kernel, and all your applications. It can be a slog. But it also lets you tailor to your exact needs.

@okinawadreaming

Жыл бұрын

youd probably need to cross compile the kernel, from a more capable machine. that adds another layer of complexity.

i had a similar issue with usb boot hanging on a thin client from the same era. rufus 'add fixes for old bioses' flag fixed it for me. just have to write images using rufus and check the box under advanced options

I get such a strange nostalgia and joy from hearing old floppy disk drives, its a good 15 years or more since I last used them on my father's PC haha. Thanks for sharing

That's definitely a good-looking little tablet. I'd like to see a more modern version of this.

The USB devices don't show up under hard drives in the BIOS boot menu setting, right? And PLOP comes with a bunch of USB compatibility settings, as well as forcing USB 1.x, have you tried those? Edit: For the keyboard, I recommend the Onscreen package regardless of the desktop environment

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

The BIOS is very limited and doesn't show detected USB devices. I didn't know that Plop has USB 1 compatibility settings, thank you for mentioning that.

Another great video. It definitely shouldn't require so much computing power to emulate 4 bit pop-station. This is result of cluttered programming, where programmers code very inefficiently due to how powerful current hardware is.

Massive respect for the video! Got a new subscriber!

@JanusCycle

6 ай бұрын

Hey thanks, glad you are enjoying!

Fun videos, and this guys voice is very soothing and relaxing lol.

@JanusCycle

Ай бұрын

thanks!

It's always a good day when a new Janus Cycle video drops!

Just an idea. You can get something like a raspberry pi or many other SBCs to act as any type of USB storage device via their OTG port. I believe you can then get a pi to act as a floppy, cd, disk drive.

I found my ideal channel! I recently got a hit of nostalgia for my old palm tungsten e2 and nokia n770. I used to flash the hack versions of newer maemo firmware on the 770 and modded it to support usb charging and even installed linux on my palm. I saw there's a video about the n900, I'll watch that one next. Instantly subscribed!

@JanusCycle

11 ай бұрын

I'm glad you are enjoying the videos. The Nokia n770 is a cool device. Well done on adding USB charging, that was a weird time for USB and not being able to use them for charging. With most devices having a separate charging port.

First video of yours I’ve watched and subbed right away

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

cool, thanks!

Personally, Antix would've been my first choice for a lightweight Debian distro. It uses 300MB of RAM or less on idle, and offers a 32bit version.

09:30 Just a little correction. MATE is actually pronounced _"mah-tay"_ as devs wrote it. LOL! Great content. Looking forward to more videos of reviving older hardware

@No_True_Scotsman

Жыл бұрын

Was pretty dumb of them to spell it that way then

@Biaanca5036

3 ай бұрын

I'll never say JIF! well unless it's to provoke or frustrate someone, that opportunity is just too fun to avoid 😁

Este canal es impresionante. Saludos ✌️

my school mates own sony vaio but not this series in the past so your channel is amazing for me Sir

Debian could very well be simply installing the non-pae kernel Also: Debian mate should have a virtual keyboard in the menu somewhere in system tools I think

Back then, we were concerned with making sure that our ISO was being written on the drive as accurately as possible. #nostalgia (somehow though that didn't happen sometimes)

@lucasRem-ku6eb

Жыл бұрын

he only needs it to play games... Both M and Centrino were good supported in the days, great CPUs

Cool device! I have an old Acer One netbook with 1.5 gig of ram and an atom processor that is only 32 bits. It use to run on WinXP 32 bit. I tried several Linux distros and so far the best one that has yield superb results is Pi OS which is a Debian flavored Linux for SBC boards like Pi 1, 2, 3 and 4. Pi OS uses around 300mb of Ram and the UI it uses by default is LDXE which is super light and efficient. Always enjoying your videos and glad you've put this one up. Stay safe and blessings.

Dude you have a very soothing voice. Content is also very interesting. Good job

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

Thanks :)

You could probably install the Onboard package to get an onscreen keyboard regardless of which DE you choose. I’ve seen it able to run in the login screen as well. I’m curious to know if Void Linux or Apline Linux would run on this. They both use different init systems rather than systemd. Might be a little faster.

@maze42d

Жыл бұрын

init system imo shouldn't make a difference, however properly configured gentoo would definitely make a difference (of course compiled through distcc on something that doesn't lag while multiplying 7 and 7). and replace a de with a wm like i3 or dwm, altho that might be more effort than it's worth.

hi ! for the touchscreen support you could try the kde plasma de or the old gnome3 de, for the performance part you could give a try to xfce that is a really lightweight desktop enviroment.

@MrMagamarc

Жыл бұрын

Plasma is resource intensive.

@MrKata55

Жыл бұрын

Also, Plasma doesn't include a built-in screen keyboard unlike GNOME.

@maxpoulin64

Жыл бұрын

​@@MrMagamarc it can be slimmed down a fair bit, and unlike Gnome, Plasma still supports turning off the compositor which is direly needed with such an old GPU. A simple flat theme will also help. It's software rendering so even a gradient is much more resource intensive than a flat rectangle. Still probably better off with MATE or Xfce though, those use period-appropriate libraries and rendering techniques

@maze42d

Жыл бұрын

I'd give i3 a try, just get a touch keyboard like onboard, map rofi and the keyboard to the hardware buttons and bam, super lightweight and customizable

@commander3494

Жыл бұрын

@@maze42d thats a ton of effort and very difficult to get setup if you're not experienced with it though

Such a great little device. I've always pronounced Vaio sounding like pie or sky, or the rock guitarist Steve Vai, so it's interesting to hear your pronunciation. Great video!

Fascinating and nostalgic! Felt like a virtual museum tour of ancient tech ruins with a v informative tour guide.

@JanusCycle

6 ай бұрын

Great description, thanks!

Tinycore linux is another very lightweight linux option,. runs fine even on my old pentium3 system, though idk if the touchpad support is any better.

Mate (pronounced Ma-tay) looks very old because it is a fork of a very old version GNOME (Gnome 2) intended to remain as close as possible to it because back in the day that was the most popular DE and the release of gnome 3 caused a big split in the community. Modern gnome is probably the best for this kinda interface but is made for hardware made in the last like 10 years, so it makes sense why it doesn't run well. You could also try KDE & Xfce and see how well they run. As for emulation, I'd assume it'd be at least capable of running gameboy and gba games.

@AgeofReason

Жыл бұрын

F-#-## (Pronounced faay get) Because you JUST HAD TO DO IT, DIDN'T YOU SAY G -NOME NEXT I DARE U

1:26 That floppy drive hits like a ton of bricks bro

love these quirky devices! Wish the industry was still doing stuff like this. Everything just looks like an iPad or iMac now. I do enjoy the newly revitalized handheld video game consoles, but imagine a tablet computer built into a midi keyboard with drum pads, built to run full studio programs.

Nice video! I currently use the 32bit Debian 11 OS on my ancient Toshiba netbook. I can highly recommend XFCE4 since it's very very lightweight and you can customize it to look quite modern. I can recommend installing the whiskermenu (Windows like start menu). On idle without anything running it only uses 320mb of RAM, so i think it should be suitable for this ancient tablet. I also think it has decent on-screen keyboard options, i tried them months ago so i don't exactly remember them anymore.

@SonicBoone56

Жыл бұрын

Xfce is the GOAT DE. It's the only one I'll use no matter what system it's on.

@Doctom91

Жыл бұрын

@@SonicBoone56 Amen.

At least from my experience, I've really liked LMD5. The virtual keyboard it offers is pretty good, and the touch support from my experience is pretty good. It just came out in 2022 and the XFCE version is surprisingly lightweight (though I have not checked if the virtual keyboard is in the XFCE version of LMD5 or if you have to pick one of the heavier DE options to get it). Right now I'm running LMD5 Cinnamon 32-bit on a 20-year-old Pentium 4 system, and it's pretty amazing how fast it is (granted it is on an SSD but the performance hit from using a HDD isn't nearly as bad on modern Linux as it is in Windows, as I'm sure you already know). Give it a try! See what you think :D

@JanusCycle

10 ай бұрын

Great suggestions, thank you. I do have much more to learn.

Cool vid. Enjoyed watching

Your voice such hypnosis! Sounds like HAL9000 from 2001: Space Odyssey. Thanks for content!

Did you try XFCE desktop environment?

LXQT or LXDE will be the best option.

Hey, I really enjoy your channel and your voice, so chill.

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

cool, thanks!

Back in the day, we had no issue booting from disk in order to start a Linux install from a CD drive, but good luck getting those old school modems setup, especially without the Internet. Had to dual boot in order to grab the random broadcom drivers I always seemed to need. This was like redhat 6 I think? Toshiba satellite pro, 100mhz. Good times until the monitor broke and the hard drive failed. Too many failed partition experiments, and bootloader bs. Ps: love the video.

Debian has a version for just about any CPU architecture imaginable, even if some versions are outdated. I personally always recommend Xfce as a desktop environment because it just works so well and is ultra lightweight without being useless. It has surprisingly decent touchscreen support too.

Have you heard of Linux Mint? They have three variants that you can choose from based on how powerful the device is and if you go to version 19.3 you can get 32 versions

@bluetoothspeakergaming

Жыл бұрын

The latest version of Linux Mint Debian Edition also offers a 32-bit version

@0xC4aE1e5

Жыл бұрын

19.3 was EOL back in April

@First_Grafter

Жыл бұрын

@@0xC4aE1e5 yes but because he's not going to use it as his main system that wouldn't really be an issue I just know that Xfce Edition is very light and still user friendly

@First_Grafter

Жыл бұрын

@@bluetoothspeakergaming I've actually never heard of that, does it also have a very light weight version like Mint Xfce Edition?

This is cool stuff man

thank you for not being annoying and just giving us the pure content without trying to make jokes or make the video about yourself. good job, many people can learn from you

You could try using onboard as an on-screen keyboard

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

Looks good, thank you.

KDE is actually more lighweight than one may think and is *really* touch friendly. In the right setup (only base kde, not full kde), it consumes about 400 MB of RAM while still looking modern.

@arjan1995

Жыл бұрын

Unfortunately, that's still too much, since only 128 MB would be left for applications. Ideally, you want to have a DE that uses at most 200 MB of RAM, so you have more than 50% free for apps to use.

@realtuxi

Жыл бұрын

@@arjan1995 Hey! How about Enlightenment then? It's quite nice to look and and has a really really low memory footprint from all I've seen. I've seen it run below 200 MB. Mate would be another, though less nice, candidate. Has a highter memory footprint tho

@AgeofReason

Жыл бұрын

Hi I'm KDE. Hi, I'm system.d and you'll need to be this tall to ride the computer web

@AgeofReason

Жыл бұрын

All options in here are trash.

@AgeofReason

Жыл бұрын

Somebody here please say something trendy like "use Bohdi!" 🤣🤣🤣

aweeee man this is awesome, i wish i had these steps awhile ago

Wow! That has the PSP headphone & media control (possibly video?) connector! This is so cool! Cat!

You could try an interface such as XFCE or an earlier build of KDE (Pre plasma) for a better UI. Always amazing to see these old machines kicking about still, they just don't exist in my neck of the woods.

@bokexd3173

Жыл бұрын

both of them are super intensive trust me I tried them but he can try them I guess

It's "Mah-tey" and not "May-t" :)

@JanusCycle

Жыл бұрын

Thank you! I have been told this before, I must remember that's how it's pronounced.

Nice information, thanks for sharing it :)

As a retired IT guy who has been in the industry for as long as I can remember, you need to install the CD-ROM drivers via floppy disk. I remember this problem when I was starting my career in IT several years ago.

@pumpalBo

5 ай бұрын

Only valid for a Windows installation! For Lunux you need to load a kernel module by tinkering the initrd image.

Mate is the fork of Gnome 2 . "Once you are on the “ Accessibility ” tab, scroll down until you find the “ Typing ” section. Within this section, you will find “ Screen Keyboard ”. Click the toggle to enable on-screen keyboard." Similar to it is XFCE. And there are lighter Window Managers, as i3 or the puppy one JWM. Awesome, Monad, IceWM, Spectrwm, Fluxbox (my favourite), Bspwm, and Enlightenment are some. You can find blog entries with tables and their features. And you can add packages to provide services they do not have by default

Those Game&Watch Games (while slow) look amazing in this

This is the hacking content I want on YT, straight to the point, no clickbaiting, no bs whatsoever. Insta subscribed.

@JanusCycle

6 ай бұрын

Hey cool thanks! I also want to see more of this on YT. That's why I started making these videos. Glad you are enjoying.

Thank you for your videos