Slow computing
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My primary record is at
https://www.k58.uk/pages/stuff/old-computer-challenge-v3.html
I'm duplicating stuff here for giggles. I last used gopher around
1994. Might have guessed: UTF-8 issues!
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This year's Old Computer Challenge runs from Monday 10th July 2023 and
finishes on Sunday 16th July. People are documenting the challenge
using...
* a discussion thread on Sol??ne Rapenne's Mastodon account
* a Mastodon tag #oldcomputerchallenge
* and a Web site, with links to other participants' pages and details of
a mailing list for the project.
My project for the week of the challenge is to use graphical applications
as much as possible to get some maths teaching notes written.
I'm using my Thinkpad T42 with one Centrino core pegged at 600MHz and
512Mb of physical RAM. The 40Mb hard drive rotates at a stately 5400 rpm.
The software includes...
* A default slackware install minus the Plasma/KDE desktop
* Fluxbox window manager with more or less default configuration started
using startx
* Seamonkey provides the Web browser along with email and a Web page
editor.
* OpenOffice 4.1.14 provides a wordprocessor, presentation package and a
spreadsheet.
* Gnumeric spreadsheet as it has really good charting and can run
simulations more quickly than OpenOffice Calc.
* Lyx which is a graphical editor for LaTeX.
My previous Old Computer Challenge pages are
* 2021: The T42 with OpenBSD 6.9 until its fan stopped working (fixed
now)
* 2022: Using a Thinkpad X60 with OpenBSD 7.1 and a USB WiFi dongle
Day 0: July 9th
I'm editing this Web page in Seamonkey's graphical Web page editor. Some
of the mark-up might be a bit redundant but the Web pages usually render
OK on most Web browsers.
I'm just reading through some of the Web/gopher/gemini pages linked from
http://occ.deadnet.se/. I've subscribed to the mailing list that Tekk has
kindly set up: I used the old convention of sending an email to the
address given with subject 'subscribe'. It hasn't bounced which is a good
sign, but I have not yet had any kind of automatic reply from the list
manager software.
Below is the output from free -m with Seamonkey's three components running
in a single thread, UXTerm and fluxbox...
bash-5.1$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 480 314 20 25 146 127
Swap: 1023 75 948
As you can see the T42 is using a tiny bit of swap. The key to managing a
slow computer is to have a good idea what task you want to work on and
load just the software you need. This morning is Web and mail. Tomorrow
will be mostly OpenOffice and LyX.
Below is part of the output from cpufreq-info...
current policy: frequency should be within 600 MHz and 1.70 GHz.
The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 600 MHz.
cpufreq stats: 1.70 GHz:0.30%, 1.40 GHz:0.04%, 1.20 GHz:0.03%, 1000 MHz:0.05%, 800 MHz:0.14%, 600 MHz:99.45% (1028)
I'm using Slackware's 'huge.s' kernel (the T42 can't support a PAE kernel)
which I suspect is built with the ondemand CPU governor configured. My
/etc/rc.d/rc.local file has the following commands which kick in when the
kernel switches to userland...
bash-5.1$ cat /etc/rc.d/rc.local
#!/bin/bash
#
# /etc/rc.d/rc.local: Local system initialization script.
#
cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave
powertop --auto-tune
So I think that I am as close as I can be to the rules without rebuilding
a custom kernel.
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Last update: 2023-07-09
