I finally got round to trying AntiX 17.3 on a real, live Eee PC 4G, with its 4GB sort-of SSD and 512MB of RAM - not to mention the mighty 900MHz CPU (which I seem to remember is underclocked to try to make the battery life look marginally less awful.)

It took a bit of messing around, especially the "hack" mentioned previously - but installed and with all updates done, there is still over half a gig of hard drive space left. Not much, I agree - but this is a current distro, and I installed the full version which includes LibreOffice. There's also a version without, and one could always use something lighter like AbiWord, and save a little disk space.

Not exactly speedy, but it works, and I had Firefox and LibreOffice running together.

Firefox really has put on some weight, hasn't it? Slow, but at least just about useable.

Bear in mind this is a little like trying to put Windows 10 onto an eleven year old computer with - I don't know - I suppose a 16GB hard drive (and 512MB of RAM with a 900MHz CPU). The probable difference is that this works.

Can't remember whether the SDHC card reader on this particular Eee works, but if it does, that would take care of the storage problems. Indeed, one could install with the SDHC card in place, and use it for the /home partition.

No hugely practical reason for all this, other than that it is there... Good fun, though, and impressive that Linux can still keep some old equipment running.

Once I can get a little more personal energy sorted out, I must have another go at the more modern netbook with Windows 10 - probably start another thread for that. Just at the moment, I honestly couldn't be bothered with Windows. Soon, though...

Back on topic (hey, I know it's the cafe, but this is MOSTLY the Linux Distro thread), AntiX looks like an excellent distro for old equipment. I will concede that it's a bit more of a challenge in some ways than, say, Mint, and in fact it has nearly driven me doolally - I love Linux but I've absolutely no aptitude for it - but well worth persevering.

One of the reasons for its tiny "footprint" is that some of the heftier conveniences of the Ubuntu-based distros have been left out - but it's not as complicated as I make out. I've just becoome too used to just using Mint over the past couple of years, and definitely benefit from a little variety now and again.