>>108823194
yes

>>108823202
What does a 70's rock group have to do with anything?

>>108823194
>What distro would be best for that and how could I do that?
Ideally you want any lightweight distro since you're gonna be bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 speeds your laptop's internal SD card reader probably uses
>Is it possible to do without temporarily removing the hard drive?
Yes, you just install it like any other Linux distro, when it tells you what hard drive to install to, select your SD card. I did this once with an external HDD for shits and giggles

Why not buy a used second hard drive to install the linux on? SD cards are generally not suited to running an OS and might burn out before long, also if you mess up the boot partition you might lose the windows anyways.

>>108823733
>Why not buy a used second hard drive to install the linux on?
Because I don't want to completely disassemble the laptop every time I switch operating systems. SD cards are removable, that's why I want to use them.

>if you mess up the boot partition you might lose the windows anyways.
Which is why I specifically do not want to change the hard drive in any way.

>>108823401
>Ideally you want any lightweight distro since you're gonna be bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 speeds
Currently I'm considering TinyCore, Damn Small Linux, or Q4OS. But any suggestions would be nice. I'm specifically avoiding Puppy Linux though, since its live only.

>you just install it like any other Linux distro, when it tells you what hard drive to install to, select your SD card.
Can I do that without it changing the windows boot partition on the main drive? I specifically do not want it installing GRUB on the internal hard drive's boot partition, which I'm worried it will do.

Try Slax, it's a live with persistent saving

Edit the bootloader on main disk to chainload the sdcard mbr

>>108823796
Even with the windows xp bootloader you can add an entry to load another bootloader, see https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/full.html#l_plpbt4win

Main bootloader will still be the windows bootloader but with an entry to load any another os

>>108823834
>Edit the bootloader on main disk to chainload the sdcard mbr
What I want to do is use the bios boot menu to boot into linux. I can do that by pressing escape. I don't want to change the main drive or the Windows bootloader at all.

>>108823796
>Currently I'm considering TinyCore, Damn Small Linux, or Q4OS. But any suggestions would be nice. I'm specifically avoiding Puppy Linux though, since its live only.
Any of those are fine, try and see what fits best
>Can I do that without it changing the windows boot partition on the main drive? I specifically do not want it installing GRUB on the internal hard drive's boot partition, which I'm worried it will do.
I sort of did that with my actual setup (Windows on a 256GB NVME, Linux and GRUB on a 960GB SATA drive), despite the separate drives, GRUB can see and boot the Windows install. So yes, it shouldn't touch the Windows drive

>>108823867
>I can do that by pressing escape
Then you do not need a bootloader and any distribution can be installed to sdcard by partitioning and treating it like a normal drive, just be careful to install grub on the sdcard

Otherwise if you prefer the card to remain fat32 see this https://www.slax.org/starting.php

>>108823885
>despite the separate drives, GRUB can see and boot the Windows install. So yes, it shouldn't touch the Windows drive
But can I remove the SD card and still use the computer as normal with Windows?

>>108823942
Can I install and run packages on slax? Like say I wanted to install steam to play Half-Life or wanted to install neofetch through the package manager. Could I do that?

>>108823981
>>108823194
If your netbook has an intel GMA 500 or 600 GPU, it has no linux drivers

>>108823981
Yes, there's a debian-based slax version with full apt packages

As for steam i have no idea how that works

>>108823956
>But can I remove the SD card and still use the computer as normal with Windows?
Yes, if you're afraid of fucking with it during install you could also install it using a virtual machine on another computer, with the sdcard as the destination and then move it to the netbook

>>108823956
>But can I remove the SD card and still use the computer as normal with Windows?
Yes, it will behave as if only the Windows drive is there (because that will be the case)

>>108824018
Why is that? I know that even old intel extreme graphics gpus have driver support. Why are those ones specifically not supported?

Also I have a gma 3150.

>>108824042
>As for steam i have no idea how that works
Its a .deb package you download from their website.

>>108823194
I wouldn't recommend it, SD cards have ass R/W speeds and using it will be painfully slow
Also even if you install into a removable disk you'll still have to fuck with the bootloader, so you will have to make changes to the internal HDD

>>108823194
anon raspberry pis have linux in a micro sd cards, maybe look their distros, they would be somehow optimized for it
get an A2 class card, those get way better io, its the recomendation for rpis

>>108823942
>>108824213
Which is it?

Why not just get an external/portable USB SSD drive instead of dinking around with flash cards?

>>108823194
The distro isn't the bottleneck. The SD card and your system's USB bus are.
I've run Mint (a notoriously unoptimized distro) using full disk encryption from a Sandisk USB stick advertised as 100 MB/s. Not sure it ever ran at the advertised value because I never benchmarked it, but it ran very smoothly in practice.
>>108824213
>even if you install into a removable disk you'll still have to fuck with the bootloader, so you will have to make changes to the internal HDD
Bullshit. Any competent installer allows you to install the bootloader on a removable disk.

>>108824388
Because those require a whole drive and dongle hanging off the side. Too uncomfortable to use portably.

>>108824424
>Bullshit. Any competent installer allows you to install the bootloader on a removable disk.
Nta, but would you please explain how I'd do that? Google hasn't been helpful here.

>The distro isn't the bottleneck. The SD card and your system's USB bus are.
Well hardware bottlenecks are unavoidable on this system. Its a netbook with two usb 2.0 ports and an SDHC slot. The best I can do is work around that, which software can do.

>>108823194
Check if your laptop supports SD Express, it's literally NVMe

>>108824448
>would you please explain how I'd do that?
Run any distro from a live USB, start the installer, and look for the step where it asks you to install the bootloader. Select the same SD/USB drive where you're putting the system partition. If it doesn't give you that option, pick another distro.
>usb 2.0
>max. 60 MB/s
That's not ideal, but still usable if the SD card you're using can actually deliver that speed. For everyday use, what matters most is average read speed for small/medium files, followed by average write speed. Most files are smaller than the drive's internal buffer, so they get cached to the buffer quickly and written to the actual storage while you're doing other things. As long as you don't open lots of applications (many small file reads) quickly after writing large files, you should be good.
If your netbook uses an HDD, the above will probably be faster.

Wouldn't use it as a main daily, unless you want your SD card to brick after the constant reading/writing

>>108824448
use a rasberry pi installer and chose the distro you want instead of one of the predefined ones. look for a tutorial, its made for that exactly usecase

>>108824523
Its an EeePC from 2009. It doesn't even support SDXC.

>>108823194
I highly implore you to start taking estrogen. You will become much better with computers.

>>108823194
Why not just make a partition for grub to boot and another partition for Linux? After you are done with Linux you delete both of them and your windows partitions will still be there? You just need to change boot order and that's about it.

>>108824565
>you want your SD card to brick after the constant reading/writing

This so much, it's more than doable to boot from sd, rpi os has done this years ago. But it's not a good idea to do constant writes to sd cards.

Why not try and boot from usb? You can fit an nvme in an enclosure and boot from usb. It's faster and more reliable.

>>108826091
>You can fit an nvme in an enclosure and boot from usb.
Because I don't want a USB dongle tumor hanging off the side of my nice portable laptop.

>>108823834
Thanks for the suggestion. Slax works great. Took a bit of work getting a decent window manager on it though.

>>108823194
Any distro will work fine as long as your bios supports using the SD card as a boot device. It won't be fast.

>>108826294
Surprisingly, its faster than the Windows 7 install on the hard drive. Trinity slows down the startup time, but its still more responsive than 7 once its started. And with IceWM or the inbuilt Slax WM it starts up about as fast.

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>>108823796
>>108823733
You are an idiot if you don't remove the drive you want to leave untouched during install. Very poor and lazy risk management posture on your part... ever consider buying a mac instead?

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>>108826268
Buy a mac, you're clearly an aestheticsqueer.

>>108823194
Puppy linux

>>108823194
>What distro would be best for that
I revived a 2011 laptop with devuan excalibur, lxqt desktop with xfwm (the default wm)
>and how could I do that?
if you have access to linux/wsl just dd the netinstall iso on a flash drive, then boot from it
>Is it possible to do without temporarily removing the hard drive?
possible? most likely. recommended? no.

>>108823194
make sure you check benchmarks before commiting to a specific sd card or usb stick
there are some that are faster than hard drives and some that are punch card tier
you want good 4k random read write

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>>108826268
>Because I don't want a USB dongle tumor hanging off the side of my nice portable laptop.
Understandable.. you can find small usb sticks like pic related that can still outperform sd card in terms of longevity

>>108827287
the samsung fit plus is a lot faster than the sandisk ultra fit

>>108823194
Puppy linux, but I doubt your old netbook support booting from the SD card slot.

>>108826983
I did it already and it worked. Just used slackware. Windows drive is stil fine.

>>108826993
Its not about aesthetics, its about comfort. Having a long usb hard drive dongle flopping haphazardly on the side makes it borderline unusable as anything other than a desktop, which defeats the purpose of having a laptop.

>>108826998
No, it makes the boot drive read only. Practically worthless as an operating system.

>>108827287
I was under the impression USB flash drives and SD cards were internally the same, and it was only proper SSDs that had the write limit mitigation.

>>108827049
>>108827723
Speed isn't really much of a factor when I'm using such an old system. Both its USB ports and its SD card reader are outdated and slow.

>>108827893
Puppy Linux is read only, and my netbook boots from SD just fine. SD card booting is a staple feature of netbooks. Or it was when netbooks were a thing.

>>108827947
cheap drives have a tranfer rate of 50 kB/s or less in 4k random
quality drives are in the megabytes and the best ones are basically ssds

>>108827947
basically if you just use a random flash drive it will result in an unusable system
if you choose a good drive you can't even tell it's a flash drive

>>108827944
>write limit mitigation
High quality USB MSD controllers do have wear leveling, just no OS-triggered TRIM.
Also high quality USB MSD controllers use multiple flash channels for higher concurrent IO which is more noticeable in OS drive use than peak linear speed.
t. used WindowsToGo for a decade.

>>108823401
>you're gonna be bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 speeds your laptop's internal SD card reader probably uses
typical cardreader speed can run at 30mb\s which is even enough to run debloated windows 10