Another iteration of the lightweight research machine

 A couple of weeks ago I put together a post about how you could use an old laptop to make a distraction free writing machine.

That was in part informed by my experience documenting at Dow's and also various attempts to make a lightweight linux machine for research, first with an old Eee PC, and later on an old Dell laptop.

Well, the Eee has long since gone to the recyclers, and the old Dell laptop now sits in the outside studio as a general purpose machine - in practice it proved a little too bulky to carry about.

So, for this exercise I picked up an old Lenovo Edge 11 for around a hundred bucks, which when it booted up showed its origins:

but the screen was nice and clear, the keyboard clean and fully functional, as was the trackpad.The only problem is the battery, which is obviously in need of replacement - basically it gives a bare 30minutes of power, which really isn't enough.

However, that's an exercise for another day - new compatible batteries are around $40-45, so it's not a stretch.

The machine had come with Windows 10 professional but I decided that I didn't need another windows machine in my life and installed the Debian 12 Crunchbang plus plus linux distro in its place.

(I'm a quiet fan of this distro due to its incredibly small footprint and the fact it runs well on older machines. It's derived from Philip Newborough's original Crunchbang linux, which I've used on and off over the years.)

Installation just worked and in an hour or so I had a working machine

Crunchbang comes with a decent set of preconfigured software, including LibreOffice and Gnumeric, to which I added

• Focuswriter for distraction free writing
• Notable for building up little collections of notes
• Ristretto, purely because it's my preferred image viewer,
• Kate, my preferred editor
• Ghostwriter for when I don't want to write raw markdown
• Deja-Dup to back up to cloud storage

My plan basically is to dump all the created content, including Notable's .notes in ~/documents and then use Deja-Dup to back it up to my OneDrive account.

Stuff I've been working on and want to move elsewhere can simply be uploaded via the web or emailed using a service like EmailItin.

There's no mail client installed, deliberately, and nothing that will beep or bong in the background, meaning that it can be treated as a distraction free machine but the browser is there to check email, or indeed anything else. As always, the key is discipline, and for this to work as a distraction free work machine you do need a bit of commitment to avoid sliding into aimless surfing as a displacement activity.

The desktop is OpenBox and satisfyingly minimalist, with little or nothing in the way of annoying widgets. I, of course did have the fun of editing the XML configuration file for the Window manager to add my extra applications to the menu - being old school I edited the raw XML rather than the funky menu editor I've never quite got to grips with.

All in all it probably took a couple of hours, and I'm pleasantly pleased with the result ...

[update 25/07/2023]

Well I cracked and bought a replacement battery - a new one rather than a reconditioned one - for about $45 - fully charged it gives me a nominal two and three quarter hours which is enough for most desk use where there's no access to power, such as on the train or some public libraries.

Well pleased.