Warning: This is one man's hobby project. Quality and safety are not guaranteed.

Download Scrollbar Linux

ISO for AMD64

ISO for i386

Installation

Scrollbar Linux is currently unfinished. Installation to hard disk is not tested. The current ISOs are too large to burn to DVD but can be written directly to USB media with dd. If you do not already know how to do this, I recommend you try a polished beginner-friendly Linux distribution rather than this.

32-bit

Reports of 32-bit's demise on all Debian derivatives have been somewhat exaggerated! While upstream no longer ships 32-bit kernels or installers, nearly all packages are still built for i386. The baseline has been officially raised to an x86-64-v1 CPU running in 32-bit mode, but in practice the majority of applications still run on real 32-bit-only hardware from the 2000s. The 32-bit ISO here uses Devuan's 32-bit packages in combination with the Linux-libre kernel. Several packages are have been removed from the 32-bit version based both on testing what actually worked and the goal to eventually fit this version on physical DVD.

To run this your machine should probably have:

In other words, this won't run on your old Windows 95 machine, but if you have a netbook from the era when most things that were not netbooks had already switched to 64-bit or even a Pentium M laptop that used to run Windows XP, this can keep your machine going.

32-bit machines may need these workarounds:

  1. Disabling screen timeout from the taskbar: On at least one tested machine, attempts at screen blanking crash the entire X11 session taking me back to the login screen. The 32-bit ISO is still running XOrg rather than XLibre, so I'll look into this more when I get around building 32-bit XLibre packages.
  2. Adding forcepae to kernel parameters from the bootscreen: Celeron M and early Pentium M processors support but do not advertise this CPU feature. It is required by the kernel currently installed, and it will refuse to boot if you do not instruct it to proceed even without the advertised feature.