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As an owner of two i386 systems (both netbooks built around Intel's Atom N270), that run Debian, I am a little sad. I understand the reasoning, and I won't deny it is a very niche platform by now. But I had hoped Debian, with a history of supporting a wide range of platforms, would keep i386 going for a while longer.

Fortunately, bookworm will continue to receive updates for almost 3 years, so I am not in a hurry to look for a new OS for these relics. OpenBSD looks like the natural successor, but I am not sure if the wifi chips are supported. (And who knows how long these netbooks will continue to work, they were built in 2008 and 2009, so they've had a long life already.)

EDIT: Hooray, thanks to everyone who made this possible, is what I meant to say.



OpenBSD runs perfectly fine. Atom netbook, n270, 1GB of RAM, cwm+git dillo (plus DPI plugins), mpv+yt-dlp.

My ~/.config/mpv/config:

    #inicio

    ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best

    vo=gl

    audio-pitch-correction=no

    quiet=yes

    pause=no

    vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all

    demuxer-cache-wait=yes

    demuxer-max-bytes=4MiB

    #fin
My ~/yt-dlp.conf

    #inicio de fichero
    
    --format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
    
    #fin de fichero
For the rest, I use streamlink from virtualenv (I do the same with yt-dlp) with a wrapper at $HOME/bin:

yt-dlp wrapper

    #!/bin/sh
 
    . $HOME/src/yt-dlp/bin/activate
    
    $HOME/src/yt-dlp/bin/yt-dlp "$@"
streamlink wrapper

    #!/bin/sh
    
   . $HOME/src/streamlink/bin/activate
   
    $HOME/src/streamlink/bin/yt-dlp "$@"
To install streamlink

       mkdir -p ~/src/streamlink

       cd ~/src/streamlink

       virtualenv .

       . bin/activate

       pip3 install -U streamlink
The same with yt-dlp:

      mkdir -p ~/src/yt-dlp

      cd ~/src/yt-dlp

       virtualenv .

      . bin/activate

      pip3 install -U yt-dlp

On the rest, I use mutt+msmtp+mbsync, slrn, sfeed, lynx/links, mocp, mupdf for PDF/CBZ/EPUB, nsxiv for images, tut for Mastodon and Emacs just for Telegram (I installed tdlib from OpenBSD packages and then I installed Telega from MELPA).

Overall it's a really fast machine. CWM+XTerm+Tmux it's my main environment. I have some SSH connection open to somewhere else at the 3rd tag (virtual desktop), and the 2nd one for Dillo.


Thank you very much!


Alpine supports i686, I see no current deprecation plans. This may change in the next three years though, who knows.


Out of curiosity, what do you use these netbooks for?


One sits in my bathroom so I can browse random Wikipedia articles while I'm, uh, busy. The other one sits on my nightstand and plays audiobooks/podcasts when I'm going to sleep.

So nothing critical. But something they are still good at, and being very small makes them a natural fit for these use cases.


Curious, why not use your phone for both these use cases? Seems like it would be even more convenient


I can't speak for the other poster, but I like the idea a lot. Having tools with specific purposes means I can avoid using my phone for everything. No matter what games I play to remove notifications/interruptions/etc. it's always a distraction and easy to be distracted from whatever I originally intended to use the phone for.


I do use the phone for audible, but I started both uses before I had a smart phone (I was very late to the game), and I am a creature of habit. Plus the netbook has a bigger display, more storage, and a real keyboard (again, creature of habit).


antiX will be creating a Trixie-based 32-bit ISO. There's also Void, Alpine and Slackware (at least).




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