What to do with a EEE 900?

May 29, 2012 11:23 AM

Fun hacks for my old EEE 900?

I have this EEE 900 that's been made completely irrelevant by my phone (although it wasn't too useful beforehand, either.) It's got a 16GB SSD and running some version of Ubuntu or another tailor-made for the EEE ca. 2009 (possibly EasyPeasy.) It's slow, unresponsive and the keyboard is difficult to use. That really isn't the most conducive environment in which to work with an unfamiliar OS, so I haven't booted it in two years. I should've bought more RAM at the time, but I didn't, and I'm certainly not going to now (unless it's both incredibly cheap and necessary for whatever.)

Between my phone, my laptop and my PS3 I can't think of a damn thing for which to use it. Maybe a digital picture frame or something? Ideas, schematics, whatever would be great. I figure accidentally frying it is still more worthwhile than letting it gather dust.

posted by griphus to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Oh! I've been working a lot with the Arduino and related hobby electronics stuff, so any integration into that whole mishegoss would be great.
posted by griphus at 11:30 AM on May 29, 2012

It really depends on what you need, but if I had one, I'd experiment with a lightweight Linux distro, say Linux Mint LXDE and /or perhaps use the thing as a fileserver (with USB harddrive) or as a nice mediaplayer with Squeezeslave in my workshop.
Since it is small and portable you could perhaps control one of these ROV's with it :-)
posted by Thug at 11:59 AM on May 29, 2012

Oddly enough I just finished putting Lubuntu on my 901. Its quite speedy relative to the Ubuntu netbook remix that was on there before.

I find it makes a great webcam timelapse capture device. Pair it with a good camera like the quickcam pro9000 and it will run in the car for almost 6 hours on a charge. Can do videos like this.
Going to set it up next to take pictures of the parking lots next door, should have a cool rhythm to them.
I am using fswebcam in the console to cap the frames straight to disk.

I have also used it as a screen/capture device for a pole camera.
posted by Pink Fuzzy Bunny at 2:11 PM on May 29, 2012

My Eee 900 is pretty happy running Xubuntu, but like you, I haven't found a good use for it. It's been on my to do list to install Android and turn it an uber alarm clock (I haven't found any good-looking alarm clocks for desktop Linux, but there are plenty on Android).
posted by quarterframer at 4:38 PM on May 29, 2012