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.

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

@@Pusingoding meh, and? Needs better software

​@@calistheticsmurdergeese there are always alternatives

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

hey thanks!

Excellent work. Thank you so much.

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.

@@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!

@@JanusCycletry emulator

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

I second XFCE

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

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...

Xfce is lightweight but still looks great!

Would xfce not work for this case?

​@@TheGuyWhoIsSitting lxcute lighter

@@TheGuyWhoIsSitting Xfce would work fine too

@@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🫠

window manager is better

Great to hear, thank you.

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.

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

​@@LeeZhiWei8219Or DD them over

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.

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.

well said

This ^^

Agreed

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

​@@KettLovahr haha same

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 :)

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

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

cheap chipsets !

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.

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

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

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.

@@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!

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.

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

UwU

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

@@stavinaircaeruleum2275 👾

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

​@@KorbAgain;3

Thank you, I hope you enjoy the channel.

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

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.

Glad you enjoyed the experience :)

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), KZfaq (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.

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

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

THANK YOUUUUUU

F system.d

Thank you, I'll keep doing my best!

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 !!!

@@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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

that, or a lightweight wayland GUI like Phosh or Sxmo

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

@@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!)

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.

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.

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.

@@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!

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.

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

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.

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

@@SonicBoone56 Amen.

cool, thanks!

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

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

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

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

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

@@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 👀

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

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

Thank you, I'm really glad you are enjoying these videos.

Was pretty dumb of them to spell it that way then

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

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

Great description, thanks!

Thanks :)

Hey thanks, glad you are enjoying!

Plasma is resource intensive.

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

​@@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

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

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

cool, thanks!

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

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.

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

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.

Yep, it can get extremely frustrating at times. But I really wanted to test the limits of USB booting on here. With the knowledge that I could get the Firewire DVD drive when the time came.

:)

thanks!

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.

@@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

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

All options in here are trash.

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

Hey thank you. I'm glad you are enjoying some of the videos. Zorin OS looks nice, thanks.

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.

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

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

cool, thanks!

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

19.3 was EOL back in April

@@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

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

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

Thanks, I appreciate your compliment.

Looks good, thank you.

CAT should come out more haha

thank you :)