My home-made version of the Asus Eee PC...

[hunter]

I saw an Eee PC at Target and thought it would be a fun machine to play with... but my fingers are too big for the Eee PC's compact keyboard and my disposable income is too small.



http://eeepc.asus.com/us/product.htm

I did, however, have an old Dell Latitude with a bad hard drive, so I replaced the bad hard drive with a 2 gig compact flash card using one of these:



http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/adebidecf.asp

I installed Damn Small Linux (DSL) on the flash card using another machine; mostly because I'm familiar with DSL. Another small linux distribution might be prettier, but I wanted to use something I knew would work.

The whole project went very well and I'm posting this from my "new" machine.

The nicest thing about the machine is that its absolutely silent. There is no hard drive whir, and the cooling fan doesn't come on unless I plug in my external hard drive and do some serious data processing. For ordinary word processing, writing code, or web browsing the only sound is the click of the keys and mouse.

I think this is cool. If I was charging someone by the hour to build a machine like this, it would cost much more than the ASUS, but for me it's a great excuse to do more command line Linux. Point and click is so easy with modern Debian and Ubuntu you tend to forget what is going on under the hood.