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.
@remindme@mstdn.social 24 hours “remind me”
@kionite231 Ok, I will remind you on Tuesday Feb 4, 2025 at 12:27 AM UTC.
Well, right now I’m experimenting with an old mini PC, and using a couple of USB HDDs im creating a ZFS pool to serve as storage for an email server
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.
Bitcoin node maybe?
Or I could recycle it
Could you really? E-waste recycling is a great lie made so that people don’t get remorse over throwing away their devices. Electronics are too complex, diverse and full of toxic stiff to be property recycled.
If anyone wants to dive more into this, there has been some projects where people from higher income countries put tracking devices inside e-waste before sending to “recycling”, to find out where they end up. Spoiler: in poorer countries, to either be scattered around, thrown into a landfill, or be scavenged by underpaid people without any protection equipment.
Server for various open source games that don’t require much cpu or ram. E.g. freeciv, battle for wesnoth.
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.
@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.
You could turn it into a Home Assistant control panel if it has touch screen support
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.
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.
Nothing. Power waste and it doesn’t do much.
Home Assistant host MAYBE, but you can find lesser power straws to run that.
It’s okay to let things go when they’re not useful any more.
Or, turn it into art.
