What are some fun or unconventional uses for an old Atom notebook with 2GB RAM?
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sh.itjust.breaks
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Try to flash Coreboot on it.
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Server for various open source games that don't require much cpu or ram. E.g. freeciv, battle for wesnoth.
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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.
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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
