Old Computer Challenge V3
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gopher://occ.deadnet.se/1/users
Day 0
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I only learn about the challenge on the first day. Hopefully I have the
perfect challenger for this task: my trusty Acer Aspire One from 2009.
Equipped with an Intel Atom clocking at 1.6GHz, 1Gib of RAM and a 250Gb
hard drive, it barely needed any limitation to fit in the challenge.
I grab it from the shelf, blow the dust out of it and powers it.
Without much surprise, it boots into the 5 years old Void Linux I had
setup and forgot about.
I plug it in to reflow it with some juice, and ends the day.
Day 1
=====
I decide to finally install OpenBSD on this thing, and to make it work.
Years ago I had issues with the WiFi card not being usable, but it
should be fixed now right?
Obviously not.
After failing at using urndis(4) to use my phone's connection over USB,
I eventually found a working WiFi card in an Asus Eee PC from the same
era.
It took me quite some time and patience, but I got OpenBSD up and
running, with an internet access that's reliable!
The rest of the day will be spent setting up my environment, which
features many software that must be compiled, either to configure them,
or because they're not packaged:
- abduco 0.6
- dmenu 5.2
- glazier 1.1
- human 0.3
- lel 0.2
- libwm 1.3
- pm 1.4
- randr 0.0
- sacc 1.06
- webdump 0.0
- wmutils 1.7
- xmenu 0.0
- xrectsel 0.3.2
- xscreenshot 0.0
- xwait 5.7
And that's where I hit my first OCC limit: with a single core at 1GHz,
everything is slow when you're compiling stuff in the background!
Hopefully these software compile rather fast, so I just had to wait a
few seconds before using the computer again.
With the environment setup, it was time to actually use the computer.
So I decided to brag about it on the web. I knew for a fact that
firefox cannot run on this machine, even at its full potential, because
I tried it already, and failed miserably. So I installed netsurf right
away as my gateway to the world wide web.
And here is the second limit: It turns out that netsurf doesn't start
with Javascript enabled. 512Mib of RAM just isn't enough for it
apparently, so I disabled that. I could browse few website and access
online resources I need to fix issues I had with the configuration of
OpenBSD, but that's pretty much it. The web of today requires
javascript to interact with it.
I close the notebook on this unsurprising fact.
Day 2
=====
Unfortunately, this would be my last day for the challenge. I would be
on holidays the next day, with no plan to do any computing. This would
also be a very short day, as my workday turned out to be very busy.
I simply spent the night chatting on IRC from this cool little notebook
I have, happy that I revived it once again for no valid reason :)
Closing word
============
I cannot consider this challenge a success. I came in to late, and
could only use the notebook for 2 days, not doing anything meaningful.
I'm however happy to finally have been able to slap OpenBSD on it, and
I'll definitely keep using this thing when I'm on the go, as the form
factor is simply too practical! The battery is also surprisingly good
for a cheap computer of the past decade.
I'll definitely use it again for next year's challenge ;)
Bonus
=====
Pictures of "sorlag":
gopher://z3bra.org/I/u/sorlag-outside.jpg
gopher://z3bra.org/I/u/sorlag-inside.png
20230718.2207
