Didn't spend that much time on screens today. I did email and some Web
surfing this morning. Right now I'm compiling GNU Octave on the T42 using
the semi-official slackbuild. Actually, I'm part way through compiling
OpenBLAS which is a dependency. Below is the first few lines from top
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4547 root 20 0 47628 22664 15844 R 69.6 4.6 0:00.34 cc1
4545 keith 20 0 5128 2964 2428 R 4.3 0.6 0:00.05 top
1 root 20 0 2400 1408 1376 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.79 init
As you can see progress is sedate and there is some use of swap. I have a
couple of UXTerm windows going, the various compilers and build tools that
the slackbuild script runs, and Seamonkey's Web browser component and
Composer (page editor) component. One advantage of using the powersave CPU
governor is that the laptop stays nice and cool... but compilations
proceed in a sedate manner. The interface remains responsive and Seamonkey
is useable.
Why am I compiling GNU Octave? Well I thought that I had already compiled
Octave packages for Slackware 15.0 but found that they were all 64 bit.
Compiling is the usual way of adding software additional to default
Slackware install. There are some repositories that provide pre-built
binary packages but I could not find a 32 bit Octave build in any of them.
SlackOnly is 64 bit only for Slackware 15.0.
Why do I need GNU Octave? I'm teaching myself some linear algebra from
Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra for Everyone which I bought a copy of and
collected today. The exercises suggest devising simple Matlab commands to
explore some of the concepts in a concrete way with actual numerical
matrices. Octave uses a similar syntax to Matlab, at least for the basics.
Real Life: I bought Strang's book from hive.co.uk which is an alternative
to Amazon. Hive can deliver books to an independent bookshop that you
choose near where you live, and the bookshop that you nominate gets a
small cut of the markup on the book. The only problem is that Birmingham
does not have a large number of independent bookshops, so I had to go
across the city to pick the book up. Exploring the unfamiliar
neighbourhood lead to an old-school greasy spoon cafe. Plenty of space,
not many people in, no flat screen television, radio on in the background
at an almost subliminal volume level. So I stayed there for some time
writing (in a notebook with a pen). I'll be typing up some of the stuff
tomorrow in Lyx.
Reflection: I've been reading the pages that some of the other
participants are putting up. Quite a range! I think the most minimal must
be the Amiga CDTV with 9Mb of RAM (not a misprint!) which Steve Lord uses
to process pictures from an old digital camera. I'm thinking along the
lines of trying a Linux distribution that is roughly contemporary with
this T42 laptop and seeing how far I can get. The limiting factor will
always be the Web browser.
