With the friendly help of my local electronic waste disposal service
i got a new mainboard for my old Thinkpad R60 that has died a while
ago (i wrote about it in another post)... so, its back in the land of
the living and it comes near the point where we have to ask the "Ship
of Theseus" question ;-)
Now i am at the point where i have not only one but TWO usable fairly
(for my circumstances) daily driver capable computers, so what to do
with the Thinkpad? I could simply go back and install OpenBSD on it
like i had for the most time of having it in my posession, but that
somehow feels a bit too... "normal".
To make it short: I installed ReactOS.
I first encountered ReactOS back in the late 90s or early 00s when i
was meandering through the various open source OS projects. Back then
i could never get it to any form of usable state and i quickly
abandoned it. From time to time i looked again into the project (every
time when it was brought on hacker news), but never tried to install
it again. But this was about to change.
I opted to first try out a Live-CD to check if it at least boots up,
what it did, and after i goofed a bit around after i was convinced
that that i was not completely hopeless to install it i rebooted,
selected the "Install" option in the boot menu... and i got an error
message. A short look back into the documentation revealed, that at
the moment its impossible to install from the live media. Ok, no
problem, i downloaded the install image (just to mention it: the ISO
has only 108 MB) and burned it to a CD.
The installation procedure is really easy, you just follow the
instructions on the screen until i could select a partition to
install it on... only that i could not and was stuck at that point.
A bit of head scratching and reading in the documentation later i
found out that ReactOS only can handle MBR type partition tables, the
one on the Thinkpad disk was a GPT one and ReactOS can not change
anything about it. So... GParted-Live to the rescue!
After i changed the Partition table to something ReactOS can use it
took only about 5 minutes (if even) until everything was finished and
i looked at a very familiar desktop that could easily be from a Win2k
system.
Out of the box the trackpad was recognized, the display driver was
working ok...ish even its only a generic one and i could start to
install the necessary drivers to get everything else to work. Only
that i could not. It seems (as far as i understand the documentation)
that you can only install drivers the "easy" way with the wizard if
you have the drivers at hand when the system first recognizes the new
hardware.
I was not ready to dive into the depths of the registry for now so i
just reinstalled ReactOS and inserted the driver CD to let the wizard
find its drivers. The wizard reported a few successfully installed
drivers, i rebooted the system... only to find out that something had
messed up "something" really bad and the system won't start back up
again.
Ooookay, its Alpha grade software, they mention it even in the
installer, i have been warned... so just reinstall it.
To make it short: A couple of reinstallations later i found out which
drivers worked and what devices i better leave alone. After that
marathon and a couple successfull reboots i had a system where
everything besides network and sound works. I can live with that for
the moment. The speakers of the thinkpad were never really good and
if i would want to go online in ReactOS is a question that i have not
answered to myself yet. So i started to install a bit of software.
ReactOS is Windows XP compatible (or more precisely: Windows Server
2003 compatible), so it limits the available software a bit. What i
have installed so far and for now statisfies my needs:
* Lazarus IDE (Cross Platform Pascal)
* OpenOffice
* Notepad++
* 7-Zip
* IrfanView
* PovRay
* Grafx2 (A pixel graphics editor)
* BOS Wars (A real time strategy game)
After the ... ehm ... rocky installation i found the system to be
remarkable usable and started over the last couple of days to more
and more use it and fall back into a modus operandi i may be had in
the early 00s: You have anything you work with ON the computer, not
on some network drive or cloud. I started to like the workflow where
i work on a system that DOES NOT allow me to let my mind wander off
to reddit, some news site, some site optimized to make me stay and
spend my attention... but to stay focussed. Time will tell if i grow
tired of this airgapped solution and if this is only nostalgia for a
simpler time calling... but at the moment, sitting here at my desk i
think to myself: Yes, yes i could live this way again.
