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Using an EeePC 901 today

After installing Arch Linux on the old EeePC, we were all curious if it actually still serves to for somethign practical. And, surprise - it does. Even today the machine is fast enough for LibreOffice. It's quite possible to surf the web, though it does take some patience. And it's amply fast enough for gemini - I use primarily amfora, and the pages appear near instantaneously.

The kids, however, were mostly interested in trying out some programming lessons they've learned with Python. In the course they're following they currently use the turtle library to produce some fancy graphics. So, we've used pacman to install tk - one of the library's preconditions - and then pip to install tortoise. Working in python's idle IDE the machine allows them to experiment with and produce fanciful lines and shapes in all colours.

Now, this machine doesn't have the power to become the kids' main entry point to distance education. Many of the cloud environments and especially their videoconferencing components would push the hardware its limits. It does, however, suffice even today for many educational activities including - surprisingly? - programming. That said, many even of the older refurbished laptops such as a Thinkpad X230 are in my experience fully sufficient for homeschooling.

Some of you old enough might remember might remember the "One laptop per child" initiative that Nicholas Negroponte launched in 2005. The project itself is long history, but for me this experiment with the EeePC shows that a very low cost or indeed refurbished laptop remains actually a green possibility for most use cases, especially if combined with low threshold infrastructures such as gemini.