A little, almost retro experiment
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When I moved from x86 to PowerPC for the first time in 2005, it was
a 1.0GHz Athlon to a 1.25GHz PowerPC 7447A (G4). For sure, times they
are a changin'. This time I'm going to have an eight-core, twirty-two
thread POWER9 beast clocked somewhere around 3.5 GHz, but I wanted at
least to re-live the other part of the experience. So when one of my
friends offered me almost the same machine I had 2001-2005 for free,
I gladly accepted. And I said that this will be my main desktop until
my Blackbird arives.
So now I'm sitting behind a keyboard connected to a 950MHz AMD Duron
with mere 1 GB of RAM. It's in a quite horribly designed case, which
were quite popular around the start of the current millenium. I was
even considered weird buying a new computer, insisting on having it
in a plain boxy case. I put inside at a SATA SSD with SATA->PATA/IDE
convertor to make it snapier and I probably will also populate one of
its PCI slots with the Gigabyte i-RAM storage, which will make a fast
swap device.
This text is typed in second terminal of Slackware-current netinstall
miniCD, the system is being installed in the first one. Slackware was
my favorite distro back then and still is, so this won't be any limit
at all. I will see what GUI will I use, maybe this is the right time
to finaly dig into FVWM, which is the only WM, that escaped me all
those years.
Blackbird is on its way from the USA for more than a month. Yesterday
Raptor CS notified me, that USPS returned the package to them after
30 days, because there are not enough planes flying over the ocean to
get the space for shipment of this size. They are sending it again as
the anti-CoViD measures are slowly taken down in the E.U., so the air
will probably be more populated by the traffic. But no matter when my
BB arives, until it happens, I'm back in 2005. Except it's 2020.
