I found this netbook(?) somewhere in old things and just wonder: can linux be installed on it?
Surely its easier to install Linux than android.
I want to know how they put android on it
I mean, the internals might just be the ones of a tablet or something. With android I’d be guessing its an ARM chip
Wut. This thing is like a decade old at least. Did we use ARM back then?
ARM chips were common in phones, even 10 years ago. But after doing a bit of research, there seems to be an unofficial open source version of android made to run on x86. Might be that this thing is running that. No idea, really
Just want to say good luck. Someone brought me one of these and asked to make it ready to be their university laptop in 2013. I worked real hard not to laugh because money was obviously tight but I just told them to return the pos to Amazon.
Looks very similar to the Windows CE device action retro has in this video so what he used could be helpful https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=anz17CNMixU
Alpine Linux if ARM7 but it is older arm i think
No, you’re not allowed. Now go to your room and think about what you’ve done.
*what you have NOT done.
Fixed that for you
Yes you can, it won’t be great though.
I used to maintain a Linux distribution called “OpenWM8650” (back in 2011 / 2012) which was specially aimed at the WM8650 and WM8505. It would run off the SD card. Which wasn’t great, but the flash onboard support was horrible at best.
Maybe you can find some old information on it, on XDA because the website for the initial distribution is long gone.
https://archive.org/details/wm8650-linux It might have been archived here.
This device should be able to run Linux fine of the specs you provided are correct. You can either use CLI or a Light weight Window manager like IceWM. Web browsing and video playback are out of the question but it most certainly can run vim.
I would just install Debian. It is likely a 32bit machine.
The first image for wm8650 that comes up is a Debian boot logo.
This looks like one of those low cost netbooks from the time where “EPad” and “MID” tablets were a thing. There is an edition of Windows CE floating around for these - but WiFi will not work, neither the modem if this has one built in.
No idea about Linux - there is a kernel so you’re technically half way there, but considering most of these had a slow single core ARM CPU and 256MB of RAM on a good day, practical use is limited IMO
It probably has USB, wifi adapters are cheap.
The nice thing is that it already runs Linux. The less nice thing is that it’s running some ancient Linux 2.6 kernel with Android on top of it.
It should be doable to install Linux in some form or another onto it, but it won’t be easy like installing Linux on a PC.
Take a picture of the bottom pls
I’m not sure its appropriate here
that’s it: CPU: WM8650 800Hz Memory:DDR 256MB and information about screen. Literally
Wow
The other guy’s getting started link is a good place to start. It will take some work
well in a cosmic sort of sense, it already is. (android is based on a modified linux kernel). seriously though, check out https://antixlinux.com/ it’s a distro to put on any computer, even ones that old.
MX Linux is the sister project, and I think it also can work on very old hardware.
It had problems with my multi monitor setup, but it booted so ridiculously fast, even on a live ISO. Certainly worth a look.
Not enought ram for MX Linux
It should! As long as you can get it to the bios screen you should be able to get it to boot a live USB. I actually resurrected my EeePC1005 two weeks ago with DamnSmallLinux2024.
Looks like you already did
Most likely yes, as many others have said. Of course you’ll likely have to pick a very lightweight DE.
As a fallback there is always NetBSD.
NetBSD will not work at all with Broadcom Wireless
I mean if you’re down to NetBSD as your pick you’ve probably already made some big concessions so plugging into Ethernet isn’t a huge leap at that point.
Broadcom makes the wifi
