Making the most out of an old laptop for home improvement

Question

My old Compaq laptop's (circa 2005) been lying around useless for the longest time so last week I decided to make a Linux box out of it. So far, I have set it up to provide the following services,

• Samba File Server
• SSH Server
• BitTorrent

which is what most would consider a pretty standard home server setup. While it's been a really fun activity for my part, it's been tremendously useful too in our home setting of 6 users with so many PC's, laptops and smartphones. It's been a great hands-on experience too for me learning about networking and Ubuntu/Linux.

Now, I'm wondering what other cool and useful things I can do with our Linux box. After all, CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth are barely being used really. Can anyone share their less common home networking projects or experiments? Would really love to make more out of my Linux box.

Answer 1

You can run distributed computing project like folding@home on it. It will help scientists and maybe someday find a right cure for you.

Answer 2

There's no definitive answer for this and technically falls outside of what superuser is designed for, but I would suggest you look at what people are doing with raspberry pi's at the moment.