Work has been very crazy for the past few weeks, so I haven’t had much of a chance to update this. Unfortunately I haven’t even had a chance to even play Minecraft. Although I did manage to log in and convert my local worlds to the new format, but that’s about the extent of it.

So a while back I received an eeePC 900a from a friend who owed me $25. This thing was completely dismanteled, and in an unknown working condition–and the screen is cracked. I started a thread on the LinuxOutlaws forum about what to do with it, and I thought having an SSH box would be a great idea.

broken eeePC 900a

I decided to install Debian/testing, however because of the screen being cracked and the video on the external monitor being offset horribly, I couldn’t manage to get into the bios to turn on “boot from USB.” I had to use my USB CDROM drive and an actual disc. It’s an older disc that I have, but you can turn on mirrors and it installs from the network instead of the disc and still be up to date.

broken eeePC 900a setup

In the install, the wireless was configured perfectly, and came right up. I installed the base system and laptop tools, and skipped out on the GUI desktop environment and x etc–I wasn’t going to be needing them. Once it was all set up in that regard, I set up the programs that I would be using predominantly on this remote machine:

  • Identicurse - a CLI identi.ca client that I use frequently
  • GNU Screen - this is probably the most awesome thing I have seen for using only CLI. it allows multiple “screens” which can all be doing different things and the active screen can be switched between them. Running applications keep running, even if screen is exited. very cool.
  • Alppi - CLI email client (I have it hooked to my Gmail, see here)
  • irssi - CLI IRC client. I don’t use IRC often, but when I do this is it.
  • elinks - text WWW browser
  • Tor Project - Tor, for anonymity and such. I don’t use this often because it goes rather slow, and I just wanted to see if I could set it up and get it working.

Those are pretty much the only applications that I use on here, but I may add more as I get into it.
I’ve subsequently had problems with the wireless connecting, it was rather flaky, so I just moved the eeePC next to my router and plugged in a cable. Then I installed my SSH keys and forwarded the port on my router and it has been good to go!

I can log in from just about anywhere, as well as set up my [tunnel]({< ref “posts/archive/2010-07-19-set-up-ssh–encrypted-socks-tunnel.md” >}).

The specs on this eee aren’t too great: 1GHz Atom (360? I think, not sure though). 1GB RAM. 4GB SSD.

but let me tell you, with no Xorg or anything with a GUI this thing flies. I have not been disappointed.

My next step: hook up an external USB drive, and then back files up to it. Or maybe even set up my own git or fossil repo (or mercurial, which I have been looking into).

Lots of fun stuff can be done :)

irssi

Tags: #sshbox #tunnel

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