It’s not worth shipping and handling, it’s beaten up, and I don’t know anybody who wants it. Nothing is upgradeable, unless you count inserting a microSD card.
Of course I could use it as a janky media server or a dumb SSH terminal, but I’ve already got other machines for those jobs. Or I could recycle it, but what’s the fun in that? Suggest me your wackiest programs to try, dangerous distros, or most unorthodox setups to make use of it.
As a TV for your kitchen?
Bad idea, they struggle with YouTube or any video because they don’t have hardware decoders for AVC/HEVC.
Maybe can decode by software, something easy on CPU (MPEG1 maybe), and the conversion is done by other machine.
Maybe audio?
Reference: I have one of those Atom netbooks.
WireGuard, and an external HDD. Run at a remote location for off-site backup.
I do this with a raspberry pi 3 at the in-laws. I copied the data over locally before setting it up, and after that it’s just nightly incremental rsync, which is fine even over my slow (35Mbps) upload.
I’ve been thinking about doing this too! I have a RPi 4 that’s not doing anything, and I don’t really have a great offsite solution for backups and I have family in another country. Maybe next time I go over there I’ll see if they’ll let me set one up lol.
If it has an ethernet port (or perhaps a USB to ethernet dongle), maybe a PiHole DNS using Debian or the like? It is apparently supported on other Linux distros than Raspbian.
If it supports micro SD XC (i.e. capacities higher than 32GB) or you have a USB hard drive or high capacity USB flash drive, maybe a samba server for file storage? I often use my file server as a substitute for digging out a flash drive any time I want to quickly pass a file between two machines in my house.
Swap in a new display controller board, get a cheap Bluetooth keyboard and wire the eee PC (maybe?) to the controller board. Then, remove the internal board and drive to make space for an old Android phone on which you can install a Linux distro.
Voila! A “laptop” that you can upgrade whenever you get a new phone or if someone donates a phone to you.
Server for various open source games that don’t require much cpu or ram. E.g. freeciv, battle for wesnoth.
You could turn it into a Home Assistant control panel if it has touch screen support
@monovergent I’ve always wanted to get something like this and just make it boot up to a full screen asciiquarium. Lol
See if it runs either Menuet OS or Kolibri OS, they’re about the smallest non-linux OSs I know of.
I recently discovered kmscon: a hardware accelerated utf-8 & emoji capable replacement for the standard Linux console. Put that on.
Try to flash Coreboot on it.
Bitcoin node maybe?
Minecraft server is always easy and fun. Honestly any game server.
You could use it to host a simple webpage too.
It would have to be a very old version of Minecraft. The recent ones take a lot of CPU power and RAM, even without mods.
It would probably work great for something like a Quake III or Unreal Tournament server though.
The recent ones take a lot of CPU power and RAM, even without mods.
AFAIK the footprint is only slightly heavier than the old versions if you use the performance mods, not to mention these flags for the OpenJ9 JVM.
Nothing. Power waste and it doesn’t do much.
Home Assistant host MAYBE, but you can find lesser power straws to run that.
Could use it kind of like an extra monitor with something like Barrier.
Could use it like a home assistant for a kitchen or something, but I don’t know if there’s any good privacy respecting software for that ATM (looks like MyCroft went bankrupt).
I used an old laptop I had laying around for controlling a Maslow CNC. Could also use a laptop to run OctoPrint or something.
Host a Lemmy server
sh.itjust.breaks
