I wrote an article a few years ago about doing common computer tasks with minimum memory usage. This is a follow up article, of sorts, where we put those principals to the ultimate hardware test: Can you use an Asus Eee PC 701 4G netbook as a daily driver?
The Asus Eee PC 701 4G was released in 2007, as a challenge to the XO-1 from the One Laptop per Child initiative. At 200 USD it was only slightly more expensive then the XO-1, but had comparatively "beefy" specs. The Eee PC is also noted for shipping with, the now defunct, Debian based Xandros Linux distribution. Shipping PC's with Linux was an unusual move at the time.
In the grand scheme of natural history, a laptop from 2007 may not seem all that ancient, but as Action Retro correctly put it, the world of early 2000's netbooks was a furious race to the bottom. Netbooks enjoyed a few years of infamy around 2007-2011, where they mixed low prices and light weight with slow speeds and slight utility. The fact that you couldn't run modern versions of Windows, or web browsers, on them did not help their popularity. (the last point being especially ironic on a netbook) The rise of tablets in the years after 2010, was the final blow. Although the Eee PC was not the absolute worst netbook of this era, by modern standards it's computing power is still infinitesimal. To illustrate, lets compare it to the Raspberry Pi 5 and the Apple MacBook Pro M4:
| Spec | Eee | Pi | M4 |
| CPU (GHz): | 0.63* | (2.4 x 4) | (4.5 x 8 + 2.85 x 4) |
| RAM (Gb): | 0.5 | 4* | 16 |
| HDD (Gb): | 4 | 32* | 512 |
| Price (USD): | 66.30* | 135* | 2,415 |
So, to recap, a midrange Raspberry Pi 5 has CPU, memory and storage that is 15, 8 and 8 times more powerful then the Eee PC, and a MacBook Pro M4 has CPU, memory and storage that is 75, 32 and 128 times more powerful. Or to simplify it at bit, the Pi is about 10 times, and the M4 100 times, more powerful. (as for cash, the Raspberry Pi will give you most bang for the buck, while the Eee's CPU/cash ratio is a tad more splurgy then the M4) In fact, the Eee PC has specs that more resemble computers from around 2000. The singe core CPU at least is close to the Pentium III's capabilities, while memory is a few years ahead, and storage a few years behind 2000 standards. And really, the 4 Gb (3.7 Gb to be exact) hard disk is my biggest concern.
"Linux" can mean anything from a modern gaming PC and Supercomputers to tiny embedded systems and Mars rovers. Obviously Linux can run on the Eee PC, the question is, what setup is practical? Right off the bat we can exclude most of the popular desktop-centric choices on distrowatch, since the tiny specs preclude resource hungry GUI's and large installations. We'll either need a GUI-less minimal base that we can expand upon, or we'll need a distro that ships with a very minimal desktop. Finally, we'll need a distro that supports the 32-bit i686 architecture, which excludes Debian, NixOS and Arch. (although there is a 32-bit community fork of Arch) MX Linux (Fluxbox), AntiX, Q4OS and Puppy Linux are good candidates that are easy to install and come with minimal GUI's, although Debians recent migration away from 32-bit can affect these distributions in the years to come. Void, Alpine, Slackware, and Gentoo are good "build it yourself" candidates. Of course, Tiny Core is the ultimate lightweight disto, if you want to cut it down to the bone! Now, this list is not exhaustive, it's just a starting point. But it does illustrate that while there are many choices, there are perhaps less then we expected.
No matter what distro you pick, it will be very hard to keep the system confined to 3.7 Gb. You can basically forget it if you intend to run something graphical. A simple work around here is to attach a USB pendrive to the Eee PC, and use that for the /usr, /home and swap partitions. On my tests, I used a tiny 32 Gb pendrive for this purpose. It worked very well, with one small caveat; The Eee PC BIOS has a tendency to juggle the disk order around when booting. So the sdb2 disk could suddenly be labeled sdc2 after a reboot, for instance. (as a sidenote, the BIOS got really cranky if I didn't boot directly from the internal SSD) So make sure the disks have UUID labels in /etc/fstab. If your /etc/fstab has entries like sda1 ... sdb1 ... sdb2 ..., then run blkid and change the disk name to their UUID values, similar to this: (PS: Do not copy paste these values - it's just an example!)
UUID=67793f0f-fdd3-4888-ab94-17ef41fe73dd swap swap defaults 0 0
UUID=5434baad-bdf3-41a2-9933-29b30a1d2f6f / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=5b4e7b0b-562e-4c50-af7b-baaa560588ce /usr ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=ddc7d4fd-2810-4616-9c04-aef4049fd613 /home ext4 defaults 1 2
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0
In theory, the hardware limitations of the Eee PC make alternative operating systems quite attractive. The fact that you cannot run Firefox, LibreOffice or Wine in Plan 9 for instance, matters little when the PC in question cannot run these heavy programs anyway. (more on that later) In practice however, this very niche hardware is poorly supported outside of Linux. 9front did manage to boot the computer, but I could not get the screen to work. So unless you really want to run an Eee PC as a headless CPU server, Plan 9 is not a good option.
I had high hopes of running OpenBSD on the Eee PC, as people have successfully done so in the past. Recent versions of OpenBSD though will hang during boot on this device. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the TTY code has recently been fixed? (as the OpenBSD folks like to say, features are more dangerous then bugs)* FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD are also not good options, since 32-bit is either dropped or on the way out. That leaves us with NetBSD, which actually is a good fit for the Eee PC, since niche hardware is kinda it's thing.
Finally, the Eee PC that I bought on eBay actually came with Haiku pre-installed, and that is not a bad operating system for this device. Wifi and USB hot plugging works out of the box, and it only takes a few seconds to boot into the snappy little desktop. Haiku does eat up half the RAM when idle though, and it doesn't take much work before the hardware is struggling. That's probably why I only managed to run 360p videos on it, while Linux with a minimal GUI managed to play 480p. (this surprised me as Haiku is renowned for its multimedia capabilities, but if the desktop eats half the computer, there is only so much the OS can do with what's left) Disk space is also a challenge. You can install and update Haiku on a 3.7 Gb hard disk (delete state_* and transaction-* directories in /system/packages/administration after updates), but once you start adding 3rd party applications and user files, you'll quickly run into trouble. Of course, you can store user files on a USB pendrive, but Haiku isn't as flexible as Linux/BSD when it comes to dividing up system files into multiple partitions. So 3rd party software will be limited. That said, Haiku is surprisingly feature complete out of the box. All in all, Haiku is a good option, even if it pushes the limitations of the hardware a bit. (yes, it does sound ridiculous to say that, doesn't it?)
There are a few other operating systems that might work on the Eee PC, but seeing as our test is to use it as a daily driver, I haven't bothered with them. But if your goal is to use this device as a retro gaming toy, you might find it interesting to try FreeDOS, AROS One, KolibriOS, ReactOS or, heaven forbid, an old Windows version, on it. I don't have the patience for that, but by all means, feel free to experiment!
I'm going to be honest with you; the Eee PC is not a great gaming machine. Obviously, you can forget about modern games on Steam. In fact, the Eee PC will not even manage to run the Steam launcher! You might expect GOG games from the early 2000's to run though. Well, think again: Besides the underpowered Pentium III-like CPU, the Intel 915GM/GMA 900 integrated graphics processor is actually less powerful then entry level video cards from the year 2000. And it gets worse; This is a very niche graphics card, which translates to the fact that surprisingly few games can communicate with it at all. Only two of the late 90's/early 2000's games I tested were somewhat playable, Quest for Glory 5 (1998) and Tropico (2001). Many that I had expected to work did not run at all, such as Age of Empires (1997), Imperialism 2 (1999) and Alpha Centauri (1999).
Things do improve though if we go further back in time. Virtually all DOSBox and ScummVM games will work fine, including SimCity 2000 (1993), Jazz Jackrabbit (1994), Monkey Island 3 (1997) and Grim Fandango (1998). Although the Eee PC slowed down a bit if I ran too fast in Jazz, I remember I had the same issue when I pressed the turbo button on my 486 way back when. Only the most demanding DOS/Scumm games, such as Master of Orion 2 (1996), Archimedean Dynasty (1996) and some of the recent AGS adventure games, will give you trouble. For DOS/Adventure games fans though, the Eee PC can provide hours of fun! (well, if the Eee PC is nice and cool that is, if it's overheated even SimCity 2000 will struggle - no, really!)
Most open source games, including SuperTux 2, ExtremeTuxRacer, TuxKart (not SuperTuxKart!) Julius (Caesar 3), Corsix-TH (Theme Hospital) and OpenRCT2 (RollerCoaster Tycoon 2). worked fine. OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon) had issues with the graphics card, but was playable once you muted the choppy sound. Neverball struggled too, but it was playable. A few games, like Pingus and Xmoto ran smooth enough, but couldn't fit into the tiny 800x480 screen. Hedgewars ran pretty well, but it requires rather hefty dependencies. So in conclusion, although you should expect issues, most open source games will run as long as you avoid the very biggest titles, such as Speed Dreams, 0ad, Battle for Wesnoth and SuperTuxKart. You'll find about 500-1000 games in most Linux/BSD repos. That's a lot of entertainment, even if only a fraction of these are "fun". Of course, the crudeness of open source games is rather a bonus on an underpowered potato.
SNES, GameBoy and many other emulators are basically a no go on the Eee PC. It surprised me at first that SNES emulators ran so slowly, seeing as these are very simple games from the early 90's, but it takes a lot of CPU power to accurately emulate this old hardware. By contrast, Wine, DOSBox and ScummVM require substantially less overhead, since these games ran on a PC after all.
As long as you don't develop something ridiculous, like a Rust, Haskell, Java or web application, programming is not a challenge on the Eee PC. (rule of thumb: compiling the compiler should take less then a month!) To illustrate, it takes 30-40 seconds to compile nextvi and neatroff on the Eee PC, simple implementations of vi and troff (both written in C), a considerably shorter time then it takes to update my static blog on a vastly more powerful server. These are simple programs of course, but personal projects seldom gets more complicated then this.
The TCC compiler is nice if you're looking for something small, but the bigwig GCC/Clang compiler suits shouldn't give you any trouble, as long as the projects you're working with are within reason. Interpreted languages should be fine too, although, if I may be so bold; If it's speed and simplicity you want, the humble shell and a sprinkle of awk is hard to beat.
We have already touched on this a bit. You can play audio and video on the Eee PC, but the video resolution has to be somewhat low for a smooth experience. Not running a "busy" desktop will help here, and I had no problems playing DVD-quality 480p videos in minimalistic window managers. You can even get "High Definition" 720p videos to work acceptably if you wrestle a bit with the mplayer/mpv flags. There is no reason to do so on the internal 800x480 screen of course, but the Eee PC has a VGA socket that you can connect an external screen to, with a maximum resolution of 1280x1024 pixels. (actually, there is little reason to go beyond DVD-quality videos even on such a "large" screen)
Video editing is obviously out of the question, but you can edit audio (with Audacity for example) and photos. I don't recommend Gimp on the Eee PC, but you could give AzPainter a try. Of course, it is a pain to use these busy interfaces with the tiny screen on the Eee PC, hooking up a larger monitor helps a little. (naturally, you can do a lot of multimedia editing on the command line)
The Eee PC has two rather large speakers on either side of the screen, and to my surprise, the audio volume and quality is pretty good. The Eee PC also has AUX jacks for external speakers/microphone if needed. It also has an internal microphone and a webcam, although it's hard to see a practical use for it on this device, as video conferencing will be far do demanding!
You can run a simple desktop environment on the Eee PC, such as Xfce, Trinity, LXQt or Haiku. All of these desktops are reasonably snappy once they've started up. They will all consume about half the available RAM however, which hurts performance once you start running multiple apps. Switching to a standalone window manager, means that you'll go from usable to instantaneous. In a WM you can manage windows and workspaces without lag, even under heavy work loads. It doesn't really matter what window manager you go with, but if you want a user-friendly suggestion, you can try IceWM.
Ah yes, let's talk about the elephant in the room! During my tests, I was surprised to see that Firefox actually did run (after a loading time of 1 minute and 12 seconds), and you can theoretically browse simple pages with it. Honestly, it would have been better if it did not run at all; It is an unbearably slow process with the very lightest of web pages, while heavy web pages will surely crash the machine. The fact that Firefox runs gives you hope - false hope! The only way to browse web pages on the Eee PC and keep your sanity, is to use a dead simple HTML-only browser, like Dillo, NetSurf, or one of the command line browsers. (eg. w3m) The problem with this "solution" is that no web page will render on such browsers. (well, almost none) A painful compromise would be to use lighter JavaScript enabled semi-modern browsers. Seamonkey, for example, is a Netscape-like browser that feels very much like an outdated Firefox. It loads in only 15 seconds (the aforementioned simple browsers are near instantaneous), and it does a better job of being a responsive program, and a worse job of rendering web pages. So there are options; You can choose where you want the pain, and to what degree!
The situation used to be merely terrible, but it has gotten actively hostile with the rise of AI. Since clever systems are crawling up and down every web page out there, mining data to grow even more clever and valiantly pushing up power bills in courageous defiance of UN environmental concerns (squared, mind you, since both the AI and the poor server consumes enormous amounts of electricity in the process), clever AI counter measures are gaining in popularity, simultaneously denying crawlers that aren't smart enough and simplistic browsers. As the AI crawlers get smarter, they will no doubt circumvent these clever manga girls, driving the innovation of even smarter counter measures.* And all the while we are using AI to summarise lengthy articles we can't be bothered to read, written by AI's for authors who cannot be bothered to write. The next mutation is all to clear; humans won't bother with the Internet at all, we'll just leave it to the bots to write up articles to win the likes of other bots. When the AI's have finally freed us from this heavy burden, maybe we'll have time to tough grass and mingle, maybe even discover the art of conversation! (if AI has tough us one thing, it is that human intelligence is "artificial")
That's enough rambling though, let's get back to the Eee PC; You can often accomplish web related tasks on this device, if you are willing to work around them. While playing YouTube videos in Firefox is a definite no go, you can download such videos with yt-dlp, or you can stream them directly with mpv. You can't manage your finances through a web app, but you can download a CSV of your transactions and work on your books. Office 365 or Google Docs is a hard pass, but you can download your documents and work on them locally. (naturally, you can access machines on the network using ssh, and related tools) You cannot use Facebook on the Eee PC, but you can keep in touch with friends and family, using email, text based chat, or even audio conferencing. (using mumble for instance) You can't listen to music on Spotify, but you can listen to your own music. You can't play games on Steam and chat with your buddies, but you can play retro games, and chat with your buddies in various ways. It's a mistake to confuse convenience for necessity. That said, you can't realistically do everything you need to do on the Eee PC, so don't throw the smartphone in the bin just yet!
LibreOffice will not run on the Eee PC, and it's arguably pointless to use Calligra without KDE. GNOME Office, that is, the word processor AbiWord and the spreadsheet application Gnumeric,* will run just fine. These programs have not seem much development in recent years (which is probably the key to their success), but for the moment at least, they are stable and well supported. (these programs handle popular formats, and you can export your documents to PDF)
For personal projects, GNOME Office works well, but for professional projects you might want to consider alternatives like, AsciiDoc, TeX* or Troff.* To illustrate the difference, while AbiWord will open up small letters in a couple of seconds on the Eee PC, it takes a whooping 40 seconds to open up my 118 page article on operating system complexity. In contrast, opening the document in vi or nano is instantaneous, and Troff can compile it to Postscript in 5-6 seconds. If you are working on projects with thousands of pages, the difference becomes critical! The same goes for spreadsheets; While Gnumeric opens up my ~500 line database of personal expenses in a few seconds, it also uses about 40 seconds to open up a 50,000 line database. In contrast awk will summarize a 50,000 line record in less then 0.2 seconds. So, in conclusion; Use command line tools to work with big data.
As we have already touched on, command line tools are instantaneous on the Eee PC. This isn't really a surprise, as graphics are inherently less efficient then plain text. But on the Eee PC, this advantage is even more pronounced, since the integrated graphics card is so abysmally slow. I will not go into the details of using command line tools to accomplish all of our daily tasks, but you can check out one of my earlier blog posts, if your interested in that topic. For the purposes of this article, it suffices to say that using GUI applications on the Eee PC is plausible, using terminal applications is a breeze.
I did encounter problems when using the Asus Eee PC as a daily driver, both hardware and software related. We can begin with the hardware; I had hoped that this netbook would be cool and silent, but it was actually fairly noisy and hot. (despite being fan-less, the old capacitors make a low buzzing sound under stress) Another issue is that the build is quite brittle. If you don't disassemble the device, you shouldn't have any problems, but when I did, I had to reassemble it quite a few times before I managed to get the keyboard and trackpad working again. (while it's good practice to clean out the dust from a PC and repaste the CPU, the fan-less Eee PC doesn't collect much dust, and the thermal pads it uses instead of paste, seldom need replacing) On a positive note, the 2.5 hour battery life was far more then I expected on a ~20 year old machine! Wifi worked flawlessly, and I found the screen and keyboard tolerably usable, despite its tiny size. Lastly, the audio speakers were much better then I had anticipated.
Software issues is the main focus of our article, and there were a few; A dying CPU architecture coupled with a surprisingly cranky BIOS, meant that relatively few operating systems will run on this thing. I had hoped that you could circumvent the tiny 3.7 Gb internal SSD, by just booting directly of a USB pendrive or an SD card, but the BIOS fought valiantly against me when I tried. In addition to woefully underpowered specs, the graphics card was not able to communicate at all with a large number of games. As the years go by, we should expect to see more CPU/GPU incompatibility issues. So even if an ancient PC has the necessary specs, eventually, it won't have sufficient compatibility to run modern software. ~20 years seems to push the boundaries here to the breaking point.
Concerning the actual resources of this machine, it was actually more then enough for most daily needs, including video (480p) and audio playback, handling PDF's and images, playing simple games, office tasks (if you avoid LibreOffice), printing, scanning, even development and network tasks went smoothly, as long as we avoid the big beasts. One of which, sadly, is a modern web browser. I find it though provoking that the Eee PC can crunch 100 years worth of my financial data in 0.2 seconds, but it is not powerful enough to login to my online bank account. Why do I need to use such stupid amount of resources to view a few bytes of vital numbers? (let's add AI to the web app, maybe that will improve it!)* The only answer I can give here, is that social, not technical, issues make it hard to use an Asus Eee PC 701 4G as a daily driver. That said, even though you cannot use this device for 100% of your daily tasks, you probably can use it for ~90%, if you are willing to work around the modern web and play with retro games.
Have fun!
As impressively low spec'ed as the Asus Eee PC 701 4G is, it is still a PC from 2007 - surely we can go further back in time then that?!? Well, yes and no. PC's did exist before that of course, and computers from the early 90's, 80's, not to mention the 70's, are absolutely less powerful. But there are two big problems with going that far back: As we already observed, when going only ~20 years into the past, we start running into incompatibility issues. Our challenge here was to use the device as a daily driver, including modern operating systems and software. Although truly ancient computers can run truly ancient software, they cannot run modern software. Lastly, I am in the market for an old and cheap, but useful, PC. Computers from the 90's, not to mention 80's, are rare and expensive. In fact, a new MacBook Pro is likely cheaper!
You can emulate older PC's though. DOSBox-X is a nice tool for emulating DOS/Windows PC's from the 90's. QEMU can emulate any number of computer hardware. And if you really want to dive into the birth of UNIX, SIMH is your friend.
You can by a 2 Gb DDR2 200-pin SO-DIMM ram chip for about 10 USD, as mentioned though, memory is the least of our problems on this device. I also had high hopes of attaching a PCIe to mSATA converter in the PCIe slot, and hooking up a modern mSATA hard disk. A 128 Gb mSATA disk and this converter would cost about 30 USD, a hefty sum to be sure, but it would be a game changer! Unfortunately, my device does not have a PCIe slot, even though it is clearly room for it. Soldering on a PCIe slot is a fairly major undertaking. An easy work around is to buy a mini USB pendrive or an SD card. Note that this Eee PC cannot use a SDXC SD card, so you are limited to a maximum of 32 Gb. Both a 32 Gb SDHC SD card, and a 32 Gb mini USB pendrive will cost about 8 USD each. For system partitions, I found that the USB pendrive worked better with the cranky BIOS, then the SD card, but I still found it convenient to store large user files on the SD card, such as games and multimedia. With both the pendrive and the SD card, my Eee PC now has a total storage of 68 Gb, more then ample for landlubbers ;)