Old computer challenge day 1
I decided to use a very low spec inspiron
dell laptop that has been laying around
aimlessly for over a year.
Not really old computer, but easily the
less powerful machine I have.
I don't think the hardware would affect my computer
usage that much since for the last year I've
been reducing my computing power,
by going text and offline first...
I'd like to see how minimal of a system
I could run from.
Ok it boots, but run arch linux. I probably
can make it more minimal, but forgot my root
or user password. I would need a boot usb and
mount the drive, then change the pass...
that's a lot of energy...
Whatever, lets re-install something more
minimal. I find Slitaz as a very small
linux distribution.
Lets try that. They have really minimal image.
I download a 8mb core one. But yeah that's not
a live cd... Ok, lets download the 40mb live cd.
A few bios change latter, I can boot no problem.
It's a pretty decent system for 40mb download.
It has a graphical interface and all. But I don't
want to be running from a usb drive for the
whole week. Lets install it locally.
Gparted doesn't sees the emmc drive on this
laptop. I remember that I had trouble the
first time installing arch, I needed some
other driver to get started??
Ok so lets drop the install on the emmc, lets
pop in a micro sd and install on there. The
micro sd is 64gb, which is already twice the
size of the soldered emmc!
The install took a couple trials and errors, but
finally it said it was good. Lets reboot
to the SD card. I was wondering about the SD card
reader on there, and if my boot sector is on there,
the system would need to have that drive mounted
before the system launch.. can that work?
So yeah, that didn't fly either. Rebooting,
playing with grub settings, trying to find which
is which. I think the grub slitaz uses is a bit
different?? Not to sure as I don't play in Grub
too often.
Well there, another hour wasted... I'm thinking
maybe I should load openwrt, as it's a fun distro
to play with and has a lot of the tools I would
need to the old computer challenge.
I download the image and dd it to the micro sd card.
Same problem with the boot... I feel I need to install
it on the emmc drive to make it work.
Ok lets try to install netbsd instead. Download, DD,
it won't even boot!
So that was all the time I wanted to spend on the
old computer challenge that you can read more about here:
gopher://dataswamp.org/1/~solene/article-old-computer-challenge-v3
First day... complete failure...
