Breathe New Life Into An Eee 900

June 20, 2011 9:56 AM

Just acquired an old EeePC 900. My first thought was to play around with Meego on it, but Meego requires a 901. What would be something fun or quirky that I could do with this old hunk of white plastic?
posted by drleary to computers & internet (7 answers total)

I put Ubuntu (desktop version) on my 901.
posted by orthogonality at 9:59 AM on June 20, 2011

I have a 900 with an older (9.10) Ubuntu on it, it came with I think Puppy Linux. I wouldn't go past Ubuntu 10.04 desktop or netbook.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:18 AM on June 20, 2011

Try EasyPeasy Linux. It's a version of Ubuntu designed specifically for netbooks like the EeePC 900.
posted by BinaryApe at 11:10 AM on June 20, 2011

My 900 only had the 4GB SSD. I put a 32 GB SD card in there and use it for all sorts of things. Every so often I'll get bored with the OS and fiddle with something different. Right now I'm quite happy with Xubuntu 10.04 LTS. Trying 11.04 was not good at all. Primary use these days is an internet radio. I plug in into my stereo or carry it out to the shed when I'm working on something. I set up some external speakers out there so it's plenty loud. Also it's fun to think of it sometimes not as a netbook but as a tiny server with a built in UPS.
posted by BeerFilter at 11:53 AM on June 20, 2011

Got Jolicloud on mine. It rescued it from the dead. While I haven't researched yet how to do it, I'd love to re-purpose it as a car-GPS with some sort of mapping freeware.
posted by teg4rvn at 12:37 PM on June 20, 2011

install gentoo
posted by jingzuo at 2:10 PM on June 20, 2011

I have an Eee 701 with an external drive set up as a home server/downloader/backup machine - Transmission for bittorrent, SABNzb for Usenet, Privoxy to provide ad-blocking for my main computer and iPad, rsync for backup. Everything is either automated or controlled through a web interface. Works great, and with a bit of tinkering you can get power usage right down (IIRC mine is under clocked to 450Mhz, and Powertop will give you lots of power-saving suggestion).

For general netbooky use, I'd go with Slitaz which runs entirely in RAM, and is remarkably speedy on the 701, so it should be brilliant on the 900.
posted by jack_mo at 5:52 AM on June 22, 2011