Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Going 32-Bit With SliTaz In 2026

April 30, 2026 by Jenny List 15 Comments

We’re used to seeing technologies move with the times, and it’s likely among Hackaday readers are the group who spend the most time doing that and are most aware of it. There’s one which we’ll all be aware of which has quietly slipped away for most of us almost without a word, I speak of course of 32-bit computing. For most of us that means 32-bit computing on x86 machines, and since the 64-bit x86 instruction set we all now use has been around for nearly a quarter century, its 32-bit ancestor is now ancient history.

In the world of software that means we’re now in an era of operating systems and browsers dropping 32-bit support, so increasingly keeping a 32-bit machine up to date will become a challenge. That sounds like something just painful and difficult enough to subject to a Daily Drivers piece, so just how practical is it to use a 32-bit machine for my daily work in 2026?

2005 Just Gave Me A Computer

My trusty Dell, showing the SliTaz desktop — Not looking too bad for a 21 year old laptop.

On my desk I have a Dell Latitude D610. It was made in about 2005 in the days when Dells were solidly made, and with its 1.6GHz Pentium M and 2Gb of memory it represents roughly the final throw of the dice for a 32-bit Intel laptop. Just over a year later it would have been replaced by one of the Intel Core series with the 64-bit instructions grudgingly adopted from AMD, but at the time it was a respectably useful machine.

It came into my possession about eight years ago when I used it to test the Revbank bar tab software for my hackerspace, and for the past six years it’s languished unloved in my box there. It’s got an ancient Ubuntu distro on it, so my first task is to pick a 32-bit replacement from 2026. That’s now a dwindling selection, so it’s time to start digging though some minimalist distros. With the supply of those based on mainstream distros drying up as they drop 32-bit support, it’s time to look into more esoteric offerings. This fits well with the ethos of this series, we’re all about the unusual here.

Cutting out the mainstream based distros certainly narrows the field, and out of the promising contenders in the minimalist field, I went for SliTaz. It uses Busybox and the Openbox desktop, that runs from RAM. I was looking for good application support in the repos, and this distro has the things I need. Download it, stick it on a USB stick, and let’s see what it can do. I know one thing, I wouldn’t have been able to download that ISO in five seconds with the internet connection I had in 2005. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Going 32-Bit With SliTaz In 2026” →

Building An X86 Gaming PC Without Intel, NVIDIA Or AMD Parts

April 30, 2026 by Tyler August 20 Comments

This is an interesting challenge from the “why not?” files — [GPUSpecs] over on YouTube built a gaming PC without using a single component from NVIDIA, Intel, or AMD. That immediately makes us think of the high-power ARM workstations or perhaps even perhaps the new “AI workstations” coming available with RISC V architecture, but the challenge here was specifically “gaming PC,” not workstation. A gaming PC, without a GPU by one of those three? To make it even more interesting, the x86 CPU isn’t Intel or AMD either.

If you’re of a certain vintage, you may remember Cyrix. Cyrix reverse-engineered the x86 ISA and made their own compatible chips in the 90s, before being bought out by National Semiconductor, and then VIA Technologies. VIA partnered with the Government of Shanghai to found Zhaoxin, and it is from Zhaoxin that the KaiXian KX 7000 CPU hails — an x86-64 device, that isn’t Intel or AMD. We’ve actually covered the company before. This particular chip benchmarks like an old i5, so not spectacular, but usable.

Continue reading “Building An X86 Gaming PC Without Intel, NVIDIA Or AMD Parts” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 869: Linux On Your Toaster

April 29, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett 1 Comment

This week Jonathan chats with Andrei, Mahir, and Praneeth, live on location at Texas Instruments! The team at TI has been working hard to provide really good Open Source support for Sitara processors, including upstreaming support to the mainline Linux kernel. We talk about the CI pipeline for these devices, the challenges of doing Open Source at a big company, and more. Check it out!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 869: Linux On Your Toaster” →

2026 Green Powered Challenge: Supercapacitor Enables High-Power IoT

April 28, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

With all the battery technologies and modern low-current sleep modes in most microcontrollers, running a sensor and microcontroller combo off-grid and far away from any infrastructure is usually not too difficult a task. Often these sorts of systems can go years without maintenance or interaction. But for something that still has to be off-grid but needs to do some amount of work every now and then like actuating a solenoid or quickly turning a servo, these battery-based systems can quickly run out of juice. To solve that problem, [Nelectra] has come up with this high-power capacitor-based IoT system.

Although supercapacitors don’t tend to have the energy density of batteries, they’re perfectly capable of powering short tasks in off-grid situations like this. They’re also typically able to tolerate lower voltages, extreme temperatures, and shock better than most batteries as well. A small solar cell on the top of this device keeps it topped up, and when running in deep sleep mode can hold a charge for up to six days. In more real-world applications supporting sensors, relays, or other actuators, [Nelectra] has found that it can hold a charge for around three days. When a quick burst of power is needed, it can deliver 1.5 A at 9 V or 500 mA at 24 V.

[Nelectra]’s stated goal for this build is to bridge low-power energy harvesting and practical field actuation, enabling maintenance-free systems such as irrigation control and remote switching without batteries, going beyond simple sensor applications while not relying on always-on power from somewhere else. Something like this would work really well in applications like this automated farm, which has already provided some unique solutions to intermittent power and microcontroller applications that need very high reliability.

2026 Green Powered Challenge: Adding Low-Power Sleep To Microcontrollers

April 27, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 19 Comments

When building a project to operate on battery power for long periods of time, having a microcontroller with a reliable and extremely low-power sleep mode is critical. When processing power isn’t needed, it should be able to wait around using almost no energy until an interrupt triggers it. Once triggered, the CPU performs its tasks and then puts itself right back to sleep, making sure the battery lasts as long as possible. Unfortunately, not every microcontroller has sleep capabilities or has an acceptably low level of power use for maximizing battery life. For these systems, a tool like this power manager might come in handy.

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Hackaday Links: April 26, 2026

April 26, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

It’s been three weeks since the Artemis II crew returned to Earth, and while the mission might be over for Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, the work is only just beginning for engineers back at NASA. In a blog post earlier this week, the space agency went over the preliminary post-mission assessments of the spacecraft and its ground support equipment, and detailed some of the work that’s currently taking place as preparations begin for Artemis III.

During Artemis I, higher than expected damage was noted on both the Orion’s heat shield and the Space Launch System (SLS) launch pad. But according to NASA, the changes implemented after that first mission seem to have prevented similar issues this time around. The post also explains that reusable components of the Orion spacecraft, such as the avionics and the crew seats, are already in the process of being removed from Integrity so they can be installed in the next capsule on the production line.

While watching the live stream of the Artemis mission is the closest most of us will ever get to experiencing spaceflight, that doesn’t mean you can’t explore the solar system from the comfort of your own home — or more specifically, your browser. [Sani Huttunen] has created an incredible web-based solar system simulator that lets you explore our celestial neighborhood throughout different periods of time. You can tour the moons of Jupiter, see how the planets aligned on the date of your birth, and even check in on the Voyager probes. There are some very valid reasons to be skeptical about software moving to the web, but we’ve got to admit, this is a very slick demonstration of just how far modern browsers have come.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: April 26, 2026” →

2026 Green Powered Challenge: A Portable Solar Panel, Made Better

April 26, 2026 by Jenny List 2 Comments

Many of us will have seen the portable solar panels offered on our favourite online purveyors of electronics, but some who have bought them remain unimpressed with their performance. [t.oster92] had just such an issue, and concluded that since it had great dull-day performance, it wasn’t the panels themselves that were at fault. There followed a teardown and an investigation of the circuitry inside.

The panels fed a small PCB containing a buck converter, with an 8-pin SOIC carrying an untraceable part number. Some detective work revealed it was likely to be a rebadged version of a more common part, which exposed the problem as a converter without the rating to deliver the power it should. The solution, at least in part, was to replace it with a more powerful chip on a module and reap the benefits.

This would be the end of the story, but this is an ongoing project. Next up will be adding MPPT capability to extract the last bit of juice from those panels. That makes this one a story to keep an eye on, because we could all use a decent set of panels.

This hack is part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge.