Let's start with the bad: Since saturday, my DevTerm is
somewhat dead. It simply refuses to start regardless if
its plugged into power, regardless if i enter the Risc-V
core or the CM4, its just... dead. I will investigate this
further but i needed a working system, so i grabbed my
R60 (which i had last used for my FreeDOS experiments),
switched out the harddisk (i didn't trust the SSD's i had
lying around, so i put a 320 GB HDD with 7200 RPM in it -
good old spinning rust!)
I could have gone the sane route and put something
normal and common like Linux Mint on it... but i am not
someone who likes "common" systems following the current
"industry standard". I decided to download Devuan 5.0
via my wifes computer, put in on a stick and started the
installation. Setting it up is quiet easy if you have
been around the Linux sphere for a while and there are
no real traps... but you have to read what the menus say
and nothing prevents you to shoot yourself in the foot. I
liked it from the start. After about 20 minutes the system
booted into a Xfce session and i could check if everything
worked the way i wanted it to...
At this point i - again - could have gone the boring,
"productive" route and simply stay at Xfce or istall
another common window manager from the repositories, but
i wanted to try out something (again) i stumbled upon some
time ago: The Trinity Desktop.
Trinity is a fork of KDE 3.5 and - as far as i know -
only included in the Q4OS distribution. I added the
repositories to Devuan and after a quick apt update i was
able to install it.
It may sound a bit pathetic, but rebooting into the TDE
desktop somehow felt like time travel. It felt like coming
home to a point in time where things were not necessarily
good... but better.
The sound of the HDD spinning up, the familiar login /
greeting screen similar to the KDE before it turned into
plasma... you may perhaps guess it: I was hooked. I set up
the system, downloaded and compiled Dillo, set up KSirc
for IRC, configured KMail and migrated my newsraft RSS
subscriptions over to Akregator.
The system feels incredible snappy (i mean, it should: A
Core2Duo and 4 GB RAM would still have been quiet a good
system around ~2010). Even Mozilla is absolutely useable
with multiple open tabs - but this Kaiju of a browser is
thankfully a software i tend to use less and less. Now
i somehow feel a bit of a regret having tried to replace
the Thinkpad as my daily driver - i hope i can keep it in
working state and useable for a long time to come.
Regarding the DevTerm... well, i hope i can start the
troubleshooting around the next weekend.
