Make use of your old Assus EEE PC h1101ha laptop

Long time I'm thinking what I can do with an old h1101ha laptop. I didn't want to throw it in the bin, despite the fact it has no working battery anymore.

There few things coming to my mind I can use it for:

- make home automation system

- video player

- network storage

Home automation system is a cool thing and there are many open source software products available. The drawback is that some investments of time and money are needed for all the sensors, actuators, switches and connections. That's the main reason I left this project for later.

The other two – network storage and video player look very straight forward. Just have to install any Linux and that's it. …or is it?

After some research I decided I'll go for Ubuntu. The latest version 13 seems OK. Ubuntu has pretty good support and nice GUI. The only thing I'll have to do after installing it is to set-up the samba server and the XBMC media center.

After installing Ubuntu 13 on the Assus EEE PC it turned out it's not usable. It runs so slowly, that I hardly move the mouse pointer. The fancy desktop manager in the latest Ubuntu is so heavy, that it consumes all the resources of the laptop. It has to be replaced.

The LXDE seems to be the right choice. It runs smoothly on this machine, but the video playback is not the best I've seen. Especially youtube videos.

The next step was to get rid of Ubuntu and try something else – Debian with LXDE desktop. I downloaded the latest Debian Wheezy with LXDE desktop image. It worked much faster, and the playback was good. The problem was that the external monitor didn't run on properly. The xorg modesetting driver made me troubles and the GMA500 (pulsbo) video driver as well.

Again I decided to try one more time. This time with lubuntu. It is a Ubuntu with LXDE desktop. It's lightweight and is based on the latest Ubuntu 13.04 and has the latest xorg.

So far it looks that's the right version.