I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I'm thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?
In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.
I haven't found any worthwhile guides yet, but if you have a beefier machine, you could consider Gentoo and set up a crossdev environment to compile packages for the older x86 machine, and then copy the binaries over (which I think is done automatically, I have yet to do this myself).
I also wonder how well a window manager like dwm would run on the machine.
Also, tmpfs, (Arch/Gentoo) is a filesystem that you could put files and directories temporarily into RAM/swap to greatly improve their access times. If you manage to make a small enough linux installation and have enough RAM available, you could consider putting most, if not all, of your files in tmpfs. I tried running old machines on RAM in the past, and the performance improvement is quite impressive.
I have a good desktop which I'm thinking of turning into a server, so that sounds like a great idea! I think dwm might run well by itself since LXDE also works nicely right now, but the issue with a GUI is that I also have to rely on the other graphical programs to be efficient to make good use of my limited memory and processing. Also using a touchpad for long periods of time hurts my hand, so I'd rather just avoid clicking/scrolling unless absolutely necessary.
I just figured dwm would just make it convenient to use multiple terminal windows if you do not need any GUI applications, and I think ~~zellij~~ (zellij is not built for x86, just amd64) or tmux/screen will work in vt as an alternative.
Yeah, I can't live without tmux already. On second thought I might actually try dwm only so that I can also run some lightweight pdf reader, but I'll have to see how much better it'll be than just reading on the phone.
I found
mupdfquite a good PDF reader. Only downside is that it can't display table of contents.I recommend zathura for a lightweight pdf reader.