Asus EEE 701 on Debian TTY
I recently decided that I no longer wanted to lug my large, expensive tablet and bluetooth keyboard everywhere I went, both because its size was inconvenient and because worrying about losing or breaking such an expensive device was anxiety inducing. After a little shopping around I settled on the perfect cheap device to wrangle into a writerdeck: an Asus EEE 701!
This device is old, was low-spec even in 2007, and it's absolutely tiny for a standard laptop; only 7 inches. I got one on ebay for thirty pounds including shipping. The catch is that there's no aftermarket battery around, so I had to sort of frankenstein a solution to make it portable.
The OS is Debian- not the most recent version as they dropped 32bit support, but Bookworm (fitting, really!), running without a desktop environment, all in the terminal. I used a slightly adapted version of a setup I saw from youtuber Veronica Explains, which she goes over here. It has my preferred Linux terminal text editor (Micro), kmscon to replace the default Linux terminal (so it has modern looking fonts, instead of looking all pixellated) and everything necessary to get wi-fi working so I can set it up to auto-sync all my files later on.
The battery issue has been solved by way of getting a 20,000mah powerbank that has power delivery for laptops into working with it. These old netbooks are 9.5V, while most devices nowadays tend to be 9V- which is thankfully not enough of a difference to stop it working, as long as you don't push the hardware to its limit. I got a smart cable for 9V devices that goes from USB-C to a standard laptop charger barrel, and then an adapter for the much smaller power jack the 701 uses. And it works great! I ran it for three hours and had zero issues, and I'm estimating the total battery life at around 4.5 hours on one full charge. It adds a little bit of weight, but it's completely manageable.
Really pleased with what a good experience using this thing is. Even around the house, it's so small and light, it is much more comfortable to have in my lap than my tablet+keyboard setup, and once I got used to the keyboard I was typing away happily at full speed. I suspect a lot of people who want a writerdeck that is also a full laptop are probably not looking for something quite this small, but if anyone is like me and wants the absolute smallest form factor you can get, this is a really cheap, easy to find device that works perfectly with a bit of creativity!