What are some fun or unconventional uses for an old Atom notebook with 2GB RAM?
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See if it runs either Menuet OS or Kolibri OS, they're about the smallest non-linux OSs I know of.
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to play with, sure. but in the case of a backup machine, you want something reliable, rock-solid, low maintenance and easy to use, which is why I recommended debian
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You could turn it into a Home Assistant control panel
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I recently discovered kmscon: a hardware accelerated utf-8 & emoji capable replacement for the sandard Linux console. Put that on.
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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.
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- SliTaz is fun to play and very small.
- Puppy Linux is very capable and there are Debian variants.
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There are also charities that take donations of old laptops and use them for things like education in places that don't have access to a lot of technology, so I guess you could recycle them in that sense.
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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.
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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 nitrates!
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That would be reuse, not recycle
But that's a nice suggestion
