If the soundchip in them is usable by sbemu, then at least the netbook could be quite cool, in an anachronistic way.

It would be worth looking into, at least.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-09-03, 12:18:

If the soundchip in them is usable by sbemu, then at least the netbook could be quite cool, in an anachronistic way.

It would be worth looking into, at least.

At worst the netbook should be able to handle DosBox at 486 speeds, on whatever OS he chooses.

Malik wrote on 2024-09-03, 04:33:

I suggest Linux Mint. It's easy to get into, has less problems operating and has the familiar Windows feel. Plus the forum commu […]
Show full quote

I suggest Linux Mint. It's easy to get into, has less problems operating and has the familiar Windows feel. Plus the forum community is quite helpful and friendly. Though, I did see problems installing on some machines, but generally it just works.

Once you are familiar with the Linux ecosystem, you will feel want to explore other options. But when it comes to Linux, its all personal preference, and you tend to stick to what you like.

The only reason I don't suggest Ubuntu is the so-called Unity Desktop Environment (DE). And also other distros that use Gnome3. It doesn't work like the usual Windows-que way, but more like a smartphone/Windows 8 kind of thing which doesn't make sense for a desktop. You can't put anything on the desktop without tweaks, and you can't change much without tweaks. And you can only see 1 application at a time, like a smartphone. You can't have multiple windows on the same desktop, and you can't have shortcuts on the desktop without heavy tweaking. But Gnome3 works well if you don't want to tweak anything, and works well in a home TV entertainment system in which you just run games and emulations, since you don't need to switch between applications, as I have installed as mentioned below.

I was using Arch Linux with KDE for a very long time, but I got tired of keeping it up to date everyday due to the rolling release nature of Arch, and frequent breaking of applications due to the non-stop updates. Though you don't need to update, it's very tempting to do it everyday. Plus, the community there are .... toxic may be a strong word, but yeah...they behave as though they are Linux Gods there. 🤣

Right now using Debian 12 Stable with XFCE DE. I just want something that is dependable and stable. Right now using Debian in my main laptop and one of my desktops, and Fedora in another desktop which is attached to my TV for gaming.

(I still do have Windows installed in it's own hard drives in all these systems, just for those hard to run under Linux or too much hassle to make them work - mostly games, and for some applications that can't work outside of Windows properly - like the Gold Box Companion, which runs the SSI AD&D Gold Box games with enhancements like automapping, fix command for those that do not have it, etc. But for the rest, I just run the games and other software under Linux. But I only boot once in a while - 1 or 2 months to keep the Windows updated nowadays.)

thank you, will take it look and see what it is like and how i get on to familiarize myself with linux and see how goes

i have thought using freedos with netbook with sbemu and will look into that aswell

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-09-03, 11:48:

Yeah I just had a google about to check out some performance data. I didnt realise they made a CPU that late that under performe […]
Show full quote

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-03, 04:14:

Browsing the web and other web-adjacent things, e.g. electron apps, absolutely. Look at the memory usage of web browser tabs and […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-09-03, 03:14:

I wonder if there are many who agree.

Is browsing the web among the most hardware-intensive tasks you can do on a modern computer?

Browsing the web and other web-adjacent things, e.g. electron apps, absolutely. Look at the memory usage of web browser tabs and electron apps. Biggest reason a business laptop can't have 8GB of RAM anymore is that there just isn't enough RAM for all the web stuff.

(Now, obviously, I mean in the context of mainstream things. If you're doing 4K video editing, huge number crunching, etc, then that will continue to guzzle all the hardware you can throw at it.)

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-09-03, 03:14:

I never had a "netbook" nor an Atom based system. Where they really that bad?

Yes!

I had a Dell Inspiron I-forget-the-model-number (found it... 1012) netbook, it was the second generation with the N450 instead of the N2xx and Win7 starter instead of WinXP. I foolishly kept throwing money at it to try and make it less dreadful:
- upgraded the near useless 1024x600 panel to 1366x768
- doubled the RAM from 1GB to 2GB
- upgraded the wifi to a dual band card
- put in a 64GB SSD. Now, keep in mind, I was doing this in... 2011 maybe, when SSDs cost serious money.
It remained utterly bad. Finally I came to my senses and sold it on eBay... in early 2014. Wow. Can't believe I tried that long to make that thing passable.

Think about it this way: these Atoms are around 1.6GHz. Maybe they do a bit more work per clock than a HotBurst like my late-2001 1.9GHz Willamette, maybe at best they could be equivalentish to a 1.6GHz P6 like a Banias or something but I'm pretty sure the Banias has better performance-per-clock than the Atom. I could probably look up some better benchmarks but this estimate is good enough. Either way, that puts you somewhere around early 2002 performance at best, maybe closer to 2001. But guess what, you're not running early 2002 software. You're running 2010-era software. At a time when my aunt was getting a Q8400 with 6 or 8 gigs of RAM, my mom was getting a Q8200S with 8 gigs of RAM, etc, this thing has a ~2002, at best, processor. And we are talking about a decade that took people from 1GHz PIIIs to 3+GHz quad-core C2Qs - average computer performance probably went up 15X in that decade.

Add the useless screen, the hopelessly slow hard drive, and everything else on top of that.

And it always comes down to RAM. 1 gig of RAM was great in 2002. Passable in 2006 on XP although you really started to want more. 2GB was great for XP in 2006, but... felt a bit tight for 32-bit Vista, so you go to 3GB in 2007. Then that starts to feel tight too, and so you bite the brave x64 bullet and go to 8GB by about late 2008, 2009. And then this thing comes along and ships with 1GB, i.e. an amount that was on the lower end for XP in 2006-7, and the max RAM you can put it in is 2 gigs.

I think with XP, they were... barely passable. But on 7? Hell no.

If you wanted a cute affordable laptop in 2010-2011, get one of the Acer 1830T or similar with 11.6 inch 1366x768 screens, real dual-core i3s, and the ability to have a civilized amount of RAM. Those machines were great for the money, too bad Acer gave up making them in the Sandy Bridge generation.

Yeah I just had a google about to check out some performance data.
I didnt realise they made a CPU that late that under performed so much.

Have one of these in a NAS.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Tur … 50/m7165vsm3190

That CPU is shocking but even if performs better than an Atom N450.

Why did you buy these machines exactly?

i got the ibook g4 years ago when someone was selling it for cheap local to me and at the time was interest in mac os etc and wanted to try as many o.s. at possible that would work on it

the netbook i got because i wanted to originally turn a portable dos gaming computer and it does work with freedos and also try with sbemu for sound but also like windows xp as some windows 98/95 game run fine on it

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-02, 21:35:

You're not going to do any web browsing on that hardware (except maybe very specialized retro web sites).

Web browsing, thanks to the so-called "modern web", is among the most hardware-intensive activities done on modern computers. These machines were barely capable of handling web browsing 12-15 years ago.

I can get surprisingly far with Firefox 45 and Opera 12.18 on my Pentium III. Is browsing the Web on a G4 any worse?

Malik wrote on 2024-09-03, 04:33:

The only reason I don't suggest Ubuntu is the so-called Unity Desktop Environment (DE). And also other distros that use Gnome3. It doesn't work like the usual Windows-que way, but more like a smartphone/Windows 8 kind of thing which doesn't make sense for a desktop. You can't put anything on the desktop without tweaks, and you can't change much without tweaks. And you can only see 1 application at a time, like a smartphone. You can't have multiple windows on the same desktop, and you can't have shortcuts on the desktop without heavy tweaking. But Gnome3 works well if you don't want to tweak anything, and works well in a home TV entertainment system in which you just run games and emulations, since you don't need to switch between applications, as I have installed as mentioned below.

Luckily, the DE can always be replaced. Fedora and Pop!_OS became far more usable once I installed Xfce; there are also flavours of Ubuntu with different DEs.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-03, 11:55:

In hindsight, yes, these things made no sense. And they are just another of the things that contributed to people thinking 'Windows = slow junk; Mac = nice' in that era.

I was thinking of getting one. They're more portable than a regular 15" laptop, yet not as crippled as a mobile phone.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2024-09-03, 14:31:

At worst the netbook should be able to handle DosBox at 486 speeds, on whatever OS he chooses.

486 performance is optimistic. The Atom N270 is comparable to a Pentium III 933, which performs more on par with a fast 286 in DOSBox.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-09-05, 14:45:

BinaryDemon wrote on 2024-09-03, 14:31:

At worst the netbook should be able to handle DosBox at 486 speeds, on whatever OS he chooses.

486 performance is optimistic. The Atom N270 is comparable to a Pentium III 933, which performs more on par with a fast 286 in DOSBox.

I have a 486 DX2 66 and an Atom N270, and have run Master of Orion 2 on both. The Atom N270 is faster running it in dosbox.

ive got mini pc with an Intel D945GCLF mini itx with an atom 230, i used it up until 2014 as an internet browser plugged into the living room tv, it was running windows 7 and was just about usable, though it was slow as shit. i got it from a company i worked for, it had xp and was used for logging repairs on a database, also had a barcode scanner, this was really all it was good for, it was pretty poor when new back in 2008. if you're gonna use it for linux i doubt it will handle anything modern at a decent speed.

as for the macbook the last Os it officially supports is 10.4, you may be able to install 10.5 but the gpu might not support quartz extreme.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-09-05, 14:45:

I can get surprisingly far with Firefox 45 and Opera 12.18 on my Pentium III. Is browsing the Web on a G4 any worse?

Hard to say. The last G4 I tried was my 867MHz PowerBook and, yes, that's utterly unusable in whatever the surviving modern web browser for the PPC OS X versions is.

I actually received a 'new' Power Mac G4 today of unknown CPU, maybe I'll try that...

The other thing lurking in the background that doesn't help is the faster evolution of OS versions. Your P3 probably runs XP (supported until 2014). The best OS for a G4 is probably Tiger (forgotten in 2008). Leopard is a lot heavier. Not to mention it removes classic which you kinda want on a vintage Mac. But I think a lot of the heavy lifting to make browsers faster (JITs, etc) was done in x86 Windows versions in 2008-2015 and your XP P3 can benefit from that, while the Mac world had forgotten PPC, especially Tiger PPC, by that point.

I would also note the SSL factor. Everything nowadays is SSL encrypted, almost nothing except e-commerce order pages was 20 years ago, and throwing SSL in the middle of everything seems to really, really make G4s struggle.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-09-05, 14:45:

486 performance is optimistic. The Atom N270 is comparable to a Pentium III 933, which performs more on par with a fast 286 in DOSBox.

Wow. So... the Atoms are half the performance-per-MHz of most other things.

I'm assuming you're making this statement based on real data, but that means the Atom is half the speed of my pessimistic armchair math in my post above. Wow.

Atom CPUs use in-order execution (as opposed to out-of-order). Accordingly their performance is terrible.

Two previous posts from 2009 and 2010 on this forum suggest 486-class speeds running Doom under DOSBox on an Atom N270.

They definitely got a lot better than the N270 (the baytrail series especially seemed to get put in everything at the time) but still pretty poor performance. It was especially comical when intel put them in android tablets with an ARM emulation library so that they could run all the "regular" android apps.

Bay Trail launched in 2013 and had speculative execution so was significantly faster. I do have, and still use (though not extensively any more), 2 tablets based on Bay Trail-T, one running Android 5 and the other Windows 10 (they were cheap, probably because of the Intel subsidy). Sluggish by modern standards but was pretty decent at the time.

If OP gets the netbook running Linux and browsing the web, I'd be interested in Speedometer scores. My Atom Z3745-based Android tablet gets 1.65 in Firefox 128, I'd imagine the N270 would get half that at best.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-09-05, 14:45:

486 performance is optimistic. The Atom N270 is comparable to a Pentium III 933, which performs more on par with a fast 286 in DOSBox.

Straight from DosBox wiki:

Based on my personal experience I’d put the N270 around 486 DX4-75/100.

i will say that normal dosbox runs games better than dosbox-x in my experience on my netbook, might try again and play with settings and tweak in future but for linux, web browsing isn't as a deal breaker but would be handy to save sneakerneting but if that need to be done then that no issue either.

just wanted to try a linux on a older device where i am not as bothered about losing data or trialling and error to get working the way i want to, also learn a different o.s. to try and see why so many people enjoy it and for retro gaming aswell and the portably aspect aswell, not being tied to a desktop or worry about laptop with a big screen etc