Well I have a few of these older x86 intel atom processor machines laying around specifically.
Digital Engine DE2700 Mini / Small PC Computer 91.ADE01.I240 - Intel 1.60GHz 2GB
I thought I would try throwing a 40GB ssd and 2GB cf card in and install ubuntu 14.04 LTS and see what I could make happen.
I installed ubuntu without much issue setting the / file system to the SSD and the CF card as a swap partition.
The system is running headless so I enabled SSH server during the install.
I assume everyone is up to speed reading this but if you need me to describe more in a later post let me know.
14.04 comes with python 2.7.6 and i wanted to install pip first. I ran a few procedures that weren't working
Specifically
sudo apt-get install python-pip
so I ended up using.
curl "https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py" -o "get-pip.py"
python get-pip.py
from here this worked properly
sudo apt-get install python-pip
Install the development libraries
sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev
Install Numpy
pip install --user numpy
Install Scipy
sudo apt-get install libblas-dev liblapack-dev
sudo apt-get install gfortran
pip install --user scipy