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? (spoiler: if your idea of a "daily driver" is watching YouTube videos in Chrome - the answer is: No)
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 pointedly 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 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 nail in the miniature sized coffin. 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. To simplify: 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 PC'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 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 desktops. 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. (there is a 32-bit community fork though) AntiX,* Puppy Linux and Tiny Core are good candidates for beginner friendly minimal desktops. (PS: Beware that only the lightest of desktops will work well on this device!) Void, Alpine, Slackware and Gentoo are good "build it yourself" candidates. Now, this list is not exhaustive, but it 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. (in addition to a 32 Gb SD card for extra storage) 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. (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: Don't copy paste this example!)
UUID=67793f... swap swap defaults,noatime 0 0
UUID=5434ba... / ext4 defaults,noatime 1 1
UUID=5b4e7b... /usr ext4 defaults,noatime 1 2
UUID=ddc7d4... /home ext4 defaults,noatime 1 2
UUID=7CC2-8AE6 /mnt/sdcard vfat rw,user,umask=000,nofail 0 0
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
Note that the UUID's are case sensitive, "7CC2-8AE6" is not the same as "7cc2-8ae6" for instance. umask=000,nofail means that anyone can read and write to the SD card (only applicable to FAT/NTFS partitions), and the machine will continue to boot even if the SD card should fail. The noatime option means that file access time is not recorded, it speeds up I/O and increases hard disk lifespan.
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 (occasionally) 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 was recently 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 should have been a good fit, since obsolete and and niche is kinda it's thing. In practice though, NetBSD did not play well with the BIOS; It just randomly refused to boot. (did I mention that this PC has an unreasonable BIOS?) As for Slowlaris,* it obviously isn't a good fit for this device!
With Plan 9, BSD's and illumos on the no go list, there aren't many alternatives besides Linux. But there is one; the Eee PC that I bought on eBay came with Haiku pre-installed (how cool is that!), and that is not a bad operating system for this device. Wifi and USB hot plugging works out of the box, and it boots into the snappy little desktop in a few seconds. Haiku does eat up half the RAM though, and it doesn't take much work before the hardware is struggling. Haiku is renowned for its multimedia capabilities, so I was initially surprised when I only managed to run 360p videos, while Linux with a minimal GUI could do 480p. But when 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. If you carefully delete state_* and transaction-* directories in /system/packages/administration after updates, you can manage a Haiku system on a 3.7 Gb hard disk, 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 when it comes to dividing up system files into multiple partitions. All in all, Haiku is a good option, even if it pushes the limitations of the hardware. (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. 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. (more or less on par with GeForce 2 MX and Radeon 7000) 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 (perhaps due to DirectDraw incompatibilities), 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 and Battle for Wesnoth struggled too, but they were technically playable. (aside from sluggish performance Wesnoth had UI issues on the tiny screen) 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 and SuperTuxKart. As for Minecraft, it obviously won't run on the Eee PC, but ClassiCube runs silky smooth at ~20-30 FPS! You'll find about 500-1000 games in most Linux/BSD repos. That's a lot of entertainment, even if you only enjoy a fraction of them. Of course, the crudeness of open source games is a bonus on an underpowered potato.
SNES, GENS, GBA 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. So emulators really aren't an option on the Eee PC, unless you're into 8-bit games from the 80's.
As long as you don't develop something ridiculously bloated, say, a Rust, Haskell, Java or web application, programming is not a challenge on the Eee PC.* To illustrate, both nextvi and neatroff (simple implementations of vi and troff) require about 30-40 seconds to compile on the Eee PC. These are simple programs of course, but personal projects seldom gets more complicated then this. Big projects can take a long time to compile, DOSBox, Wine and ScummVM took 18.5 minutes, 7 and 13.5 hours on my tests. (Rust and Chrome would probably take a month, and LibreOffice even longer - feel free to test that yourself)
The TCC compiler is nice if you're looking for something small, but the default GCC/Clang compilers suits (the size of which are on par with the aforementioned ridiculous programming environments, but for better or worse they're often required) 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; It's hard to beat the humble shell and a sprinkle of awk, when it comes to speed and simplicity.
Finally, it should go without saying that large IDE's like Eclipse or VS Code will not run well on the Eee PC. Geany and any command line editor, including Neovim and Emacs, will work fine. Vanilla Emacs at least, the editor can become sluggish if you pile on heavy plugins. (avoid LSP's in Vim!) Helix and Sublime would have given us problems, but "luckily" they aren't supported on 32-bit systems. So to recap, if you keep things lean and old school, the Eee PC can be a surprisingly practical development tool!
We have already touched on this. 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 might even get "High Definition" 720p videos to work acceptably if you wrestle a bit with the mplayer/mpv flags. (eg. mplayer -vo xv -framedrop -hardframedrop -cache 8192 -lavdopts fast=1:skiploopfilter=all:skipframe=nonref) 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 "large" screens)
Video editing is obviously out of the question, and I must confess, in my naivete I assumed that Audacity would run fine. I mean, it doesn't exactly have a bloated interface. It goes to show how little I know! In reality Audacity uses WebKitGTK for much of its interface, which is "only" about half as heavy as Google Chrome. Add other heavy pieces to the mix, and the program will absolutely not run on the Eee PC! If you have to edit video/audio command line tools, such as ffmpeg or sox, are your only option. For image editing, things are not that grim. I would not recommend Gimp on the Eee PC, but you could give AzPainter a try - it runs well, but the busy interface is annoying on a tiny screen. (of course, you can do a surprising amount with ImageMagick scripts)
The Eee PC has two rather large speakers on either side of the screen, and to my surprise, the audio volume and quality is quite decent. The Eee PC also has AUX jacks for external speakers/microphone if needed. And it has an internal microphone and a webcam, although it's hard to see a practical use for it, as video conferencing will be far do demanding!
You can run a simple desktop environment on the Eee PC, such as Xfce (disable compositing!), 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 doing work. 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 use, but if you want a user-friendly suggestion, you can try IceWM or JWM.
We could perhaps note in this context, that window managers and applications with minimal GUI's (eg. tilers) work very well on the Eee PC, precisely because they economize the tiny amount of screen real estate well. While traditional desktops feels cramped, a fullscreen terminal is comfortable to work with.
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! It is actually possible to run web browsers that load instantly on the Eee PC; Dillo, NetSurf, or one of the command line web browsers run smoothly. Of course, they don't render any web pages - but that's an altogether different kind of pain! Finally, there are quite a number of "lightweight" browsers that awkwardly try to mix the worst of two worlds; by being painfully slow and inexorably dysfunctional. Out of the dozen I looked at, Seamonkey was most convincingly almost, but not entirely, unlike lightweight.* (loading in "only" 15 seconds - you can modify the horrid default layout btw) So in conclusion, although dissatisfaction is unavoidable, there are at least alternatives. Like a polite gangster, Linux lets you choose where you want the pain; left, right or smack in the middle!
Haiku sidenote: The default WebKit based Haiku browser, Web Positive, is more or less comparable to Seamonkey in overall performance. For better or worse, you'll also find many of the popular Linux browsers in the Haiku depot.
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, clever AI counter measures are gaining in popularity, simultaneously denying crawlers that aren't smart enough and simplistic browsers. As the AI's get smarter, they will no doubt circumvent these clever 'manga sentinels', 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, we'll have time to tough grass and mingle, maybe even discover the art of conversation! (if AI has tough us one thing, it's that human intelligence is "artificial")
Enough rambling, 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 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 (eg. Claws Mail or Mutt - not Thunderbird!), text based chat (eg. pidgin or HexChat), or even audio conferencing. (eg. Mumble)* You can't listen to music on Spotify, but you can listen to your own music. You can't play games on Steam but you can play retro games. 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. You can use these programs to work with various document formats, and you can export your files to PDF. Any standalone PDF reader should work fine, but I think the minimal interfaces of Zathura and MuPDF work well on the Eee PC. As for PIM, command line tools should have you covered.
For personal documents, 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 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 you are interested in that topic. For the purposes of this article, it suffices to say that using GUI applications on the Eee PC is plausible, while terminal applications are 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 should be fine, 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. And, as mentioned, the speakers were better then I expected.
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 very few operating systems would run. 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 incompatibilities. 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 limit.
Concerning the actual resources of this machine, it was more then enough for most daily tasks, 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 stupendous 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 the Eee PC 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, play retro games and learn to love the command line.
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 in time: 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 a cheap 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 + 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 made room for it on the motherboard. 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. (PS: the Eee PC cannot use a SDXC SD card, so you are limited to 32 Gb or smaller SD cards) 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, such as games and multimedia on it. Concerning I/O speed, on my tests, the internal SSD had read/write speeds of 27.2/14.1 Mb/s, the 2.0 USB pendrive had 20.9/6.8 Mb/s and the SDHC SD card had 14.5/5.9 Mb/s. So not a big difference between them, they were all equally bad, about 20 slower then a modern SATA III disk. In any case, with both the pendrive and the SD card, my Eee PC now has a total storage of 68 Gb, which should be ample for landlubbers. (if it's any consolation, it will take the same amount of time to fill up those 68 Gb as your run of the mill Terabyte lappies)