Tuesday, 31 December 2013

New use for old hardwarEee

While playing with webcams and computer vision is fun in it's own right, I've been thinking about the uses of my these programs, and came to the conclusion that they need to be run on machines that won't be a huge loss if they go missing or get stolen, I have an old Eee pc 701sd lying around that fits the bill nicely. An alternative would be a Raspberry Pi system, with an external webcam, but my budget doesn't extend to that at the moment.

The Xandros that comes on the Eee it is not well suited to development, and is well out of date these days, so I set about finding a new compact distro for it, and settled on Lucid Puppy, a very light weight, compact, ubuntu compatible build that can be run from usb.

I started using the universal installer to make a usb to trial it on - an exercise of it's own, you need to load bios each time, look at the hard drive order, save, then press esc, and choose the usb...
LuPu ran well, quite fluid, despite the dreadful specs of that machine with a external mouse and keyboard, and running a 17" monitor powered by an able-hd (www.able-hd.com) adaptor.

Because of the effort required to boot to USB I chose to install LuPu onto the sdd, removing the previous installs, and have finally got to the point where i can write, and compile c programs, so there is more to come.

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