Remote install on netbook HP 15-1039wm

Tony0945

My grandson has the title netbook and the hard drive is dying (or is dead, don't know which).
He used to run Gentoo as a user and I still have his /home/jacob directory on the computer he used to use.

We discussed buying another netbook or replacing the drive. He would like to return to Linux.
I suggested buying a Crucial MX500 SSD to replace the dying boat anchor. Because the CPU is so weak and has only 4G, I thought of Calculate Linux or Pentoo or Sabayon or Arch for a binary install. Along the way I started to get a crazy idea. I have a brand new MX500 that I was going to replace a 250GB Velociraptor with. But maybe I could actually do an install on one of my more powerful computers and send it to him for Christmas.

According to HP, the CPU is a Celeron N2830 which is a Silvermont Bay Trail-M with built-in Ivy bridge HD graphics. That's good because it tells me which video driver to build. These one lung CPU's have a unique MOVBE instruction that my AMD processors do not have. I could possibly build with march=generic mtune=silvermont or with march=silvermont turning off specific instructions? ‘silvermont’
Intel Silvermont CPU with 64-bit extensions, MOVBE, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, POPCNT, AES, PCLMUL and RDRND instruction set support.
I could use one of my desktop kernel configs changing from nouveau or radeon to Ivy bridge HD. Actually I would build at least two models so that I could test it all out.

Don't know if that machine boots BIOS or EFI, Nor if Secureboot is used. Trying to find out.

Anything that I've missed? Or am I completely out of my mind on this project?

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5934

I posted this in another thread recently, but I'm too lazy to find it...

I would start off with

Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2018 4:56 pm Post subject:

Thank you, bunder, but the target will be moved to the silvermont machine, so the chosen parameters have to run on both machines, but favor the target. I can't use distcc, because the target is literally a thousand miles away. It's more practical to mail the small SSD in the small box it came in than mail the whole machine both directions.

However, your suggested gcc -Q to find out the differences is a very good idea.

EDIT:
Experimentation, per Bunder's suggestion, suggests that -march=Core2 -mtune=silvermont will work on both the build and target CPU's.
It looks like the i915 video driver is the one to build, along with radeon so I can test on the target. On each machine, one module will load and the other fail.

AJM · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2018 7:16 pm Post subject:

Sounds like an interesting project, but if you decide it's too much work I'd strongly recommend Void instead of Arch for a netbook.

I'm typing this on what must be the most underpowered Netbook of all time (HP MiniNote 2133 with a 1.2GHz VIA C7 CPU)

I resurrected this a while back and tried quite a few OS' and distros; none of the BSDs were much good as the WiFi/bluetooth chipset isn't supported and OpenBSD ran really slowly anyway. Slackware was the best I could find until I tried Void, but even Slackware was bloated in comparison.

Currently using 68M out of 1.5G RAM for X11, WindowMaker, Netsurf and a terminal and it boots and shuts down very quickly (maybe twice as fast as Slackware); no SystemD, *kits, Pulseaudio etc.

I'm a die hard Gentoo fan and have been for the best part of two decades; I wouldn't contemplate anything else for my desktop, but for a knockabout laptop which is far too low powered to compile its own OS in a bearable fashion I'm thoroughly impressed with Void.

Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2018 11:56 pm Post subject:

I'll keep Void in mind. I see it runs runit. That's OK. As long as it's not systemd.

Tony0945 · Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2019 10:19 pm Post subject:

So, does anyone out there have a touch screen?
I'm pretty sure both of these settings in make.conf are wrong: