That’s the thread (and I hope I’ve picked the right forum for it):
Ideas of cool stuff to do out of thrown into a corner, unused devices you might have and Manjaro.
Focus on what, not so much on how. But if you have nice pointers to follow, throw it in!
I’ll kick this off with:
- A wireless printing server;
- An Amazon-echo compatible device;
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Why this:
My dad passed away due to covid-19 
last july, and last week I finally started to scavenge into the huge pile of old computer parts and hardware he used to collect (he was among the first people to work with TI and computers here in Brazil!)
There I found three notebooks in dubious conditions. One of then had some few keys missing in the keyboard (but functional, if you don’t mind pressing the membrane directly), also missing a hdd, a part which I’ve obviously also found among the parts. That hdd was starting to show defective blocks, but I wouldn’t store any critical data into it, so I went on and installed Manjaro Xfce on the Celeron powered oldie, in a halved partition so to avoid the bad-blocks area. I installed CUPS, enabled smdb, installed x11vnc as a service and enabled ssh so to control it remotely and made a printer server out of it and done. The thing worked as a charm, and the web interface of CUPS is something nice to have in such environment.
While this seems to be common knowledge for most users round here, just what I got to learn in order to do this was worth the try! I learned a lot about systemd and services in Linux.
My next step is to make it Airprint-compatible so I can use it with my iPhone as well (I can do this with apps, but I wanna get the native way just for the fun), but even though, printing ain’t a frequent thing to do round here. So I want to stuff more functionality on the thing.
An old classmate just suggested putting some echo-dot-like functionality into it. Seems fun to discover how to do it, and I’m looking forward some further ideas!