Is there life in the console on a netbook?

Question

linux

Good afternoon!
I'm going to install linux on an old man asus eee 4g.
I am considering the possibility of installing a system without a GUI - anyway, the screen is small, surfing is not comfortable, the percentage is slow.
Basic needs: ssh, mc, nano, mocp, possibly mplayer.
In this regard, the specific questions are:

1. I would like to add something like a status bar to the console (time, battery charge, interface status, top and free, free disk space. In general, everything is the same as in i3wm, but only in a clean console. Where to dig on this topic?
   
2. I am considering ARCH as a candidate. Reasons: KISS, lightweight base system and good wiki. However, it is embarrassing that it is fresh (the cores of the latest versions) and the netbook is very old. Will it be possible to install it with the old kernel, approximately 2.6.3* branches?
   
3. Sometimes I want to watch a movie (in SD quality). What player would you recommend for outputting video to framebuffer and how to set it up optimally?
   
4. And the last thing: I want not to lose the fn-keys. What is the best way to set them up without DE?
   

Thanks in advance!
PS If you can still suggest useful software for working in the console, I will be very happy. Interested in the most adequate text browser in 2017, jabber, vk, telegram clients.

Answer 1

Take tmux as the information panel, it will replace the tile manager for you.
Replace bash with zsh + oh-my-zsh. I advise for plugins not naked oh-my-zsh, but antigen.
The most convenient player, in my opinion, is mpv - a fork of mplayer2 with a human interface.
For mail - mutt.
For the kernel. It's a bad idea to take the old kernel. There may be problems with systemd. But on 3.12, my arch worked quite well (with x, but the docker did not start). The best choice is to collect a fresh vanilla core, throwing out everything unnecessary from it. It will be better than the old core (it is still collected, because it has not been in turnips for a long time). And it's a big problem to build an old kernel on arch - you need 3-4 gcc. If you still feel like it, I advise you to collect in the docker in the form of an old debian or ubuntu.
And of course, don't forget about the bfs/bfq patches from the anesthesiologist.

Answer 2

i3wm

Answer 3

In addition to the above - Fn keys are usually visible through ACPI, you can put acpid and configure the reaction to them. Text browser - elinks . You can find a console jabber to your taste, you can also find it for telegram and vk , but there is not much choice.