Should Debian Buster work on Asus EeePC 1015px?

[Onsemeliot]

I have an Asus EeePC 1015px I ran Lubuntu 18.04 on because I figured I would need proprietary drivers anyway. But nevertheless the sound card did never work properly. The best I could achieve was to enable sound using a headphone. Therefore I decided to try Lubuntu 20.04. After installing it the third time (because it didn't accepted my LUKS pass phrasefor ages) I have enough and want to try other options. (I am also a little puzzled by the claim of the Lubuntu installer that the partition gets set-up as an MS-DOS partition by default and I couldn't see any option to alter that.) Lubuntu includes the Trojitá mail client that doesn't support GPG and Kmail is to heavy for this system. And I also so far wasn't able to set-up the key management for it even if importing the private key did instantly work on the command line. Kpass just won't accept it. And with it also Kmail. Besides, LXQt obviously can't properly handle the low resolution of 1024x768 pixel because it keeps cutting off parts of the dialogues without giving me any option to scroll to the cut-off parts. LXDE is obviously better able to serve such low resolution screens.

And since I have been a long time user of Debian I wonder if the most recent stable version should work with this hardware. Does anyone have recommendations? Would it be better to go for testing? But this would probably make no difference since the hardware is rather dated now. (In my experience the live stick of Debian isn't the best choice for installation. Therefore I usually use the version without live system. But maybe this information is outdated and it should work fine nowadays. (I need hard disk encryption.)

I just found a specific LXDE live build with non-free drivers. I will test if that works in this case ...

Some probably relevant specs:

Code: Select all

$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [Intel          ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
                      HDA Intel at 0xf7cf8000 irq 25

$ head -n 1 /proc/asound/card0/codec*
Codec: Realtek ALC269VB

$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)

$ basename -s ".ko" $(find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -type f -name "*.ko"  | grep snd | grep via)
snd-via82xx-modem
snd-hda-codec-via
snd-via82xx

[mm3100]

Just to inform you, those issues with LXQT where you can't scroll, you can move whole thing up by clicking on it and holding alt, at least that was only way I was able to use it on such small resolutions.

And live versions should work fine, I have used them few times and didn't had any issues. If anything that would help you check for issues before installation. I managed to set up disk encryption from live cd during manual partitioning.

[peer]

i have an old asus eeepc 1000H. So this is a bit older then yours
Debian 8 runs ok,
Debian 9 runs but is significant slower
Debian 10 gives a black screen

[Onsemeliot]

Thank you for your answers. I have now tried live non-free versions of Debian Buster with GNOME, LXDE, MATE and Xfce. MATE and Xfce couldn't shrink all of the windoes to the small screen and therefore are not good choices. GNOME was to heavy. Qt doesn't seem to have a small footprint mail client that does support GPG. Therefore KDE and LXQt aren't good choices in this case either. (I didn't test Cinnamon.)

Initially I had issues with getting sound on LXDE but I will give it an other try after discovering that the alsamixer can do more than the standard GUI sound tool. Namely it can mute the speakers even when the GUI tool shows it as active. Hopefully I can overcome this somehow.

My initial Lubuntu 20.04 test was actually pretty fine and I like the clean flat design but I really need GnuPG support in my mail client.

Maybe I should check out Enlightenment since it seems to be lightweight too. But maybe only until I installed all tools needed to have the desktop experience I need. Hopefully I will manage to get everything up and running with LXDE.

[mm3100]

You can always install mail client of your choice that does support GnuPG on LXQT and KDE. If those desktop environment work for you, then client shouldn't be an issue.

[Onsemeliot]

Well, if I pull in dependencies then those desktops aren't as light weight any more.

But I just found out that I had outdated information. Trojitá should actually be capable of using GnuPG. But I also found some windows in LXQt 0.7 that are cropped and it is rather annoying to try to move them around which doesn't quite work all the time.

On the other hand: Debian LXDE just refused several times to accept my encryption pass phrase upon startup. Maybe the problem is that the installer uses a msdos partition to set it up by default. (That seems to be a rather odd choice.) I was instantly able to unlock the drive from my live system. So it wasn't me forgetting the correct pass phrase. I'm not sure what to make of it.