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Log #21 || 06/30/2023 || Home Office || Lone Windows PC
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Rebuilding a ~20 year old iBook
In prep for the upcoming Old Computer Challenge (
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-06-04-old-computer-challenge-v3.html), I found an older G4 iBook to utilize from 7-10 to 7-16.
I didn't have high hopes for battery life, but it appears to run for around an hour and change (probably more if I turn down the brightness and only run a couple applications at a time).
Installing OpenBSD was surprisingly straight-forward; for an extra nostalgia hit I installed it from a cd-rom.
Applications & tools I'm attempting to prep ahead of time:
+ Hardware
- ppc 1.33Ghz
- 256Mb RAM
- 20Gb HD
- 1024 x 768
+ OS
- OpenBSD 7.3
+ Window Manager
- fvwm - lightweight, fairly easy to customize
+ Shell
- ksh
+ Terminal
- roxterm
- xterm
+ Browser(s)
- Netsurf - Appears to be the best bet for a gui browser off the hop; fairly quick, somewhat compatible
- Lynx along with w3m will be the terminal browsers I probably rely on the most
- Badworlf - Slooooooow on this particular machine
+ Mail
- TBD (Read: I was overly ambitious and tried to use Evolution which made the PPC inside this iBook burn white hot)
+ IRC
- Hexchat for joining #oldcomputerchallenge on libera.chat
+ RSS
- akregator
Other notes and quagmires:
the airport card is not working so a $6 EDiMAX USB dongle to the rescue. It worked out of the box with home and work wifi, which was a welcome surprise!
To-Do:
+ Test with public wifi - I have my doubts the terminal browsers and Netsurf will work well with the captive/portal pages some public wifi utilizes.
+ Figure out mail -> Leaning toward mutt or Claws
+ Calendar -> I'm in the midst of moving from Google calendar to ProtonMail which will be interesting.
+ JPilot -> What goes better with an old computer challenge? An Old PDA, clearly.
+ Music - figure out a way to stash at least a small amount of music locally and play it without cratering the CPU.