Back in...um...late 2000s-early 2010s, I bought a refurbished Asus EEE PC from Woot!, back in the early stages of that website that sold only one thing starting at 10:00p PST every night until 9:59p the following day or the item was sold out. It was cheap, it ran Windows XP fairly well, just had enough power and RAM to (at the time) read forums that I was subscribed to and blogging.
After a while, it became unbearably slow for "modern" (again, at the time) internet usage. Eventually, I would invest in a decent tablet and use it for online activities, mainly YouTube. The EEE PC ended up just sidelined indefinitely, and placed in a bin with other electronics that I would later look at and decide what to do with it.
Fast forward a few years when we moved to our current home. As I'm unpacking stuff into my office, the EEE PC was exhumed from the electronics bin. For fun, I plugged it back in and turned it on. Still slow, but still working. I thought maybe I could use it for something.
At that point, emulation was becoming more and more popular. Single board computers were the way to go, since most of them had more processing power than the EEE PC at this point. I looked at several Linux distributions that did emulation well on low powered computers. I ended up choosing Batocera Linux; a Linux distribution that focused primarily on retro console emulation.
I installed it onto the EEE PC and tinkered around with it for a while. It ran most 8-bit and 16-bit games pretty well. When it came to 32-bit consoles, it showed signs of lagging. I figured that I could look at it in the future to see if I could play with some settings to get it to work better, so again, I side lined it to the electronics bin.
Here we are, 6 years later, and now I want to tinker with it more. Instead of using it as an emulation machine, I went back to trying out different Linux distributions, also trying out Chrome OS Flex, to see if this EEE PC had the potential of being just a Chromebook.
The first OS I tried to load was Chrome Flex OS. Result: failed. The EEE PC runs the i686 architecture; Chrome Flex OS needs x86_64.
I then tried a distribution of Linux Mint aimed at older computers. I'm familiar with Mint, so this was going to be more of a familiar installation. Result: fail. It did install completely, but there was something about GRUB that I didn't understand. Even after wiping all the partitions off the drive and doing a fresh installation, it'll still not load properly.
I tried AntiX, Puppy, Debian, NixOS, and various other distributions that were built for i686 processors. Some would not load completely, some gave errors when trying to install, and others would install fine, but give me errors when it tried to boot.
I just gave up. I'm currently trying to reinstall Batocera again. I suppose this EEE PC will end up being my portable retro gaming emulation machine for now.
[EDIT] Update. Batocera didn't want to install at all. Lakka, another gaming focused distribution, didn't want to work properly either.I ended up trying out Haiku, which is a BeOS. It worked fine, but it wasn't satisfying to use. Killed the drive and installed Bodhi Linux. So far, this distribution didn't have much hiccups and is running pretty smooth at the moment. I'll have to see if Retroarch can be installed and decently ran through the OS.
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