Netbook.
EEE PC restomod
(Is restomod the right term?)
I got an old eee pc 701 surf from work a while ago. It's pretty good! It took a while to find an OS that would work on such low-end hardware. I ended up going with Antix-net. I figured I could learn the terminal more at the same time. I guess I intended to recreate crunchbang for myself, in a way.
The first thing I did was to change the keyboard layout to colemak. It's much easier to type on the small keyboard with that layout, and I use it on my desktop computer as well. I used a label maker to re-lable the keys.
Next I acquired a 2gb stick of ram, which probably doesn't do much when your OS uses about 30mb when idle, but it'll be nice later on.
Next I will buy it a nice new battery. The current one lasts a couple of hours, but I want more time hah. I would like to try to make use of the PCIe spot on the motherboard. I have an SSD, though it'll need an adapter so maybe it'll be better to just buy the right kind. Unfortunately the connector isn't populated. I can probably solder one on, but I dunno if I want to risk damaging it. I have a vague urge to make a keyboard for it that angles in, to be more comfortable to type on. Maybe one day. And maybe a trackpoint instead of the tiny trackpad? Who knows.
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Update 15JUN2025 Surpside reverse-chronological update!
So. I re-wiped this thing a couple of months ago and started again. Partly to start fresh as I said in the last update, but also partly because it ran out of hard drive space and then nothing would work - not even deleting things. There wasn't enough space to even do that. So I started hacking and slashing at the file system manually to see what would happen. This didn't help, but was educational. It was also educational when I tried out 'sudo rm -rf /' (or whatever the command is) and watched the computer die horribly. It was actually quite sad.
But then I reinstalled anttiX, removed any other window managers &etc, and installed herbstluftwm. HLWM is pretty neat! I decided to use polybar for the panel. I have both of them set up pretty nicely. I still want to look into having a power button on the bar, and/or figure out why the physical power button doesn't initiate the shutdown sequence this time around. Also maybe a main menu for common programs that I don't want to make shortcuts for in hlwm. Currently only xterm and otter-browser have that privelige.
I'm not going to remove the trackpad and replace it with a system status display. The trackpad is working nicely! I do still love the idea of having a lttle status display like the MNT laptops have. There is plenty of bezel real estate on this thing so I'm sure I can squeeze somthing in eventually.
One thing that I'm not sure how to fix is the CPU cooling systm. Or the lack thereof. This isn't a super efficient CPU, and the only cooling is a head spreader that is the bottom of the keyboard! There is a fan, but it's just drawing air over the flat metal base. There aren't even fins to increase surface area. There really isn't room in the chassis to improve this. Even if I made a better keyboard with better cooling ability there isn't the space for it. This is where I steer my train of thought to safer topics because the only place that line ends is me building a new chassis from scratch - if not a whole new laptop - and if I'm going to do that I might as well get an MNT Pocket Reform or something. That way lies madness.
Update: 12MAY2022
I have bought a new battery! It's the largest one I could find. Not cheap, but the netbook was free so it's fine. Amusingly they emailed me to say they haven't sold one of those batteries since 2019 and don't have any in stock, but that they could order one from the factory for me. It would just take an extra month or so of lead time. Which is fine, and I'll have a brand new battery so that's nice.
Update: 13JUL2022
I received the battery. Somehow I ordered the wrong one! It's one size smaller than I wanted, but that's what's on the order so oh well. It still lasts a pretty long time, so I'm happy with the improvement.
I still don't have X11 working, but at this stage I'm fine with that. I can do most things with the command line anyway, especially if I can figure out tmux.
Update: 09NOV2022
I seem to have stumbled into having a working graphical interface?
I've been content to stick to the terminal for months, because every time I tried to configure the xserver I was missing some piece, and I could never quite get things working. I suspect it's a matter of having a minimum number of components installed before anything will work. But at some point I got openbox to start, though the trackpad wouldn't respond. Then I think last night I installed a window manager, and today when I started the netbook I was greeted with a graphical login, and a working mouse. There aren't many GUI programs installed, and openbox itself is having trouble saving its config file, but it's something. And I can still open a terminal window for all the other things. Hell, I can scroll up on the terminal now!
I spent so much time trying to find and configure config files for scripts like xinit or startx or whichever, and all I had to do was pick a few packages to install? Figures haha. I spent a lot of time trying to get the display environment variable to exist, so I could at least move past that error. Oh well, I'm learnding.
The next trick, once I have everything working, is to nuke the install and start again with a clear list of things to do. Fun!
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