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.
You could turn it into a Home Assistant control panel if it has touch screen support
See if it runs either Menuet OS or Kolibri OS, they’re about the smallest non-linux OSs I know of.
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.
I’ve been super happy with it. Knock on wood it’s been super reliable. I have a single ZFS drive, take snapshots with various retention policies, nothing fancy.
Another fun thing is to set up a reverse proxy on it as an endpoint for services on your local (home) network which can only be accessed by VPN. For example, my Jellyfin service isn’t public facing, but I didn’t want e.g. my parents to need to set up WireGuard. So instead they can point their TV to a raspberry pi on their network to access the service — even a first gen RPI can handle Jellyfin reverse proxy over WireGuard for moderate bitrates!
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.
If it’s an asus ee, the vents are all on the sides. With a couple of shims underneath it would fit in a bookshelf with a bunch of other books.
As far as uses… nat hole punching for an overlay network is one way I’ve used these devices before.
It’s okay to let things go when they’re not useful any more.
Or, turn it into art.
Host a Lemmy server
sh.itjust.breaks
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.
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
As a TV for your kitchen?
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.
Try to flash Coreboot on it.
@remindme@mstdn.social 24 hours “remind me”
Nothing. Power waste and it doesn’t do much.
Home Assistant host MAYBE, but you can find lesser power straws to run that.
