I had installed Debian on an Acer Aspire One Laptop. It has a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU with just 1GB of RAM. I obviously can’t run it like a usual desktop anymore, it’s way too slow.
I tried it to connect it to my TV with HDMI to create some sort of “Smart TV” setup, but that didn’t work out because I can’t even play 1080p videos on VLC with it smoothly.
So… What now? Can I only use it for headless stuff like pihole, nextcloud, etc. now?
Is there any hope left for my unsuccessful “Smart TV” contraption?
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It could be a music server with mpd – then you could configure it to stream over http to other devices. Or you could configure it as a client for a music server you keep somewhere else.
Btw videos not working well because of absense of hardware decoding codecs, and it is make software decoding.
Since it’s an old acer netbook with an Intel atom cpu it is highly unlikely it has any hardware decoding built in.
It should as that’s a basic feature. It probably is just for mpeg2 at lower resolutions
Something that I considered doing with a similar laptop, was to use it as a low-end portable gaming system. I’d take a lightweight Linux distro, like the 32-bit version of Q4OS if it’s system requirements are lower than your current setup, and get it loaded with a bunch of games with low system requirements and retro emulators. Obviously, it wont be anywhere near as powerful as your main computer (if you have one) but because it’s portable, there could be some value in having a portable gaming pc (unless you have something like the Steam Deck).
Znc server
You can try with libreelec https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/13250-testing-8-9-004-x86-acer-aspire-one/
There’s lots of uses for it.
An overlay network like nebula uses “lighthouse” nodes as ways to reverse proxy to all the other hosts in the overlay. I’ve used og eeepcs as nebula lighthouses before.
“Dumb” 3d printers honestly don’t need much to bring their feature set in line with expensive ones. I still use an old netbook to control two. The screen and keyboard are great when I want to check files. Slicers and whatnot can easily run in low resource settings on those computers.
Vents allowing (and many netbooks do!), you can slide the computer into a shelf and use ssh to perform tasks on it. There’s a bunch of stuff that an always on computer with a built in battery backup can be used for at times, especially if it’s on a wired connection and you can use the wireless interface.
People will say you should be afraid of the batteries exploding or venting. I’m honestly not too concerned, but be sure to check them maybe once or twice a year.
People will say you should be afraid of the batteries exploding or venting. I’m honestly not too concerned, but be sure to check them maybe once or twice a year.
I’m more concerned with the power supply. Laptop power supplies often heat up a lot.
I’ve never seen a smps catch fire. Is that a failure state for them?
I’m trying to utilize a couple of core 2 duo macbooks for the same purpose and it’s not going great. I have twice the cores and RAM but they’re stuck at 800 MHz, because of no batteries.
anyhow, very slow and issues with a lot of codecs I throw at them. try mpv without a DE/WM.
The c2d MacBooks ought to have relatively cheap and available batteries. Why not put one in?
Print server, music box, copper scrap
Honestly, ewaste center.
Not much an atom with a gig of ram can do.
@slazer2au @maliciousonion it can play music, do IRC, Jabber, vim (neovim even, if you’re lucky). there are even TUI rendering programs for Markdown and EPUB formats
You can get a RaspPi instead, and after a year or two you’ll have saved enough electricity to have paid for itself.
It works fine for me
technically there is a lot it could do, but it would not be a number 1 pick for any of it (even if you only have a $100 budget) so i agree, get rid of it.
You can install Haiku, the BeOS clone. That one runs well on less than 1 GB of RAM, and it had a new beta recently. Linux requires a minimum of 2 GB RAM these days to load 1 tab on a browser of a middle-complexity website, before it starts swapping. To really use Linux more comfortably, you’d need 4 GB, I’d say. And if you want to do 1080p video editing as well, then 8 GB. So, try Haiku.
Run some old casual games on Windows XP!
I have a very similar spec Asus Eee PC that I use NetBSD with i3 on and it’s fine for like taking notes in vim or listening to music with strawberry. It can also run Haiku fine which I might switch to on it at some point because Haiku is fun. Anyway my best use idea is just use it to explore operating systems you’re curious about
I’m using my old netbook as Pi-hole and some home server stuff. Does its job.
You can get an old Raspberry Pi very cheap, i have a 2b but you can go even lower. It’s probably a better idea to spend a few bucks and install DietPi with Pihole on it. It uses only 5 watts, your laptop takes probably ten times more.
While this is true for my another older netbook (40 W), my netbook’s power consumption for running Pi-hole is ~15 W. I think it’s acceptable for such operation. 5 W is tempting though.
This is a very good point, and it’s one of the reasons I don’t use my old laptop as an always-on server.
You might be able to find a super lightweight desktop distro out there (I think Damn Small Linux can run on those specs?) or you could repurpose it as a basic server of some sort like you mentioned. Unless you wanted to invest in some cheap old ram to throw in there and maybe make it a bit faster, then I think those would be your best options.
In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don’t know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.
Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.
