I’m just full of bad ideas, the latest of which was a rather crude solution to low-power retro-computing… on modern hardware.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been cleaning up the filesysem and organizing things the way I like. This was a long-overdue task that I’d been avoiding since the Thinkpad T430 was struck by lightning, killing two of the three SSDs and the machine itself. Honestly I think everyone should get into the habit of good clean filesystem hierarchies from the start. It helps to avoid redundant copies of the same files on the same storage device. Spread them out onto multiple storage devices, make frequent backups and above all, DO NOT PUT THEM ALL IN THE SAME MACHINE! I was lucky to have one working SSD from which all my files could be recovered and promptly cloned. Of course it also meant scanning everything and consolidating the various subdirectories that came from other machines.
Case in point; during my own cleanup I discovered no less than FIVE separate documents describing a “portable terminal” that would essentially be the daily driver, replacing the dead laptop. I’ve been dreaming of this thing for years and never actually bothered to build the damn thing. The furthest I got was to buy the modified Geoff Graham VT100 emulator from Tindie, plus a Raspberry Pi Zero W to run NetBSD. I was going to build a box to hold the 8” IPS display and all the other electronics, preferably resembling a Kaypro in the end. There are too many issues with this setup though, and after many years I’ve finally decided to give up.
First, it’s been my daily driver for most of this year, and in that time I’ve noticed a number of quirks I cannot get past. The keyboard has no numeric keypad, but it has an aweful blue LED with a ‘1’ above it, and whenever this machine is turned on that light is also on by default. I can turn it off with the ‘Pause/Break’ key, which I only learned by trial and error because there is no indication of how to turn that light on or off. What I get for buying the only PS/2 keyboard I could find on Amazon.
That’s another issue. The terminal can only support PS/2 keyboards, which is rather limiting since I wanted to build a custom keyboard for the enclosure. Everything I’ve found about building custom keyboards seems to suggest that only USB is possible these days, unless I can somehow build my own PCB with custom programming in a microcontroller to handle the PS/2 protocol. That is way more work than I’d like to take on, especially since I would have to learn KiCAD and probably some other gigantic graphical software that I DO NOT WANT to install.
I don’t know if it’s the keyboard or the terminal, but the CTRL-ALT-Fn keys don’t work properly when trying to switch between virtual consoles. I’ve tried it with NetBSD running natively on the Pi and over SSH while connected to the Bolt running OpenBSD (more on that later!), but it always prints something to the screen instead of switching between consoles… There are similar quirks with CTRL-S and a few other key bindings. Some of them will close the current program, others will turn on the Scroll Lock indicator. That one really grinds my gears because I can turn off the light, but doing so will ALSO close any program I’m focused on…
Sometimes I like to play around with some Go code, but NetBSD is stuck on version 1.4 when the latest is 1.21.1 as of this writing. Why is that bad? Trying to build someone else’s code is a pain because Go doesn’t automatically download the dependencies, of which there are sometimes so many that I just want to scream at the thought of having to manually downloading EVERYTHING! Of course one might think it’s insane to build Go sources on a RPi Zero, and that’s probably true. I’ve done it a few times and can’t say it was fun. Actually I had to cross-compile from the Bolt just to get Bombadillo and Amfora to work on the Pi, which actually took several seconds to load the latter!
There were some other quirks in NetBSD that I found annoying, like having to run ‘stty rows 30’ every time I started the Pi. Trying to add that to .profile was not the solution, it only caused more problems for reasons I have yet to figure out. Also, working on a “real” VT100 was limiting in ways that don’t exist on a laptop. While there are jumpers on the board to select the VGA color channels (RGB), it still operates in monochrome mode. I kept it set to yellow text since it was easy on the eyes while still providing good contrast. Of course that meant not having color syntax highlighting when writing code, which seemed unthinkable for all of five minutes. It really isn’t that bad… But what if I get sick of it? What if I want colors again? There is no way I’m going to modify the source code and buy a PIC programmer just to play with adding color support to the terminal. There’s no reason to…
Because I caved and bought another Thinkpad. I couldn’t help myself, it was just too good of a deal! The T430 had 8GB RAM and an i5-2520M CPU, which was certainly an improvement over the piece of junk I had before that. This time I decided to try something a little newer, so I bought a refurbished T490 with 16GB RAM and an i7-8665U. This is a significant upgrade that can mostly keep up with the Udoo Bolt v8 for non-graphical tasks. And the best part? It’s been running OpenBSD 7.4 since the day it arrived. Oh how wrong was I about this operating system in experiments past…
There will be more to say about this latest transition, so stay tuned.
=> ../index.gmi Home
=> ../core.gmi Core Dump Index
