I've been on an impromptu business trip for Monday and most of
Tuesday, which meant two things:
1 Having to use my work laptop most of the time, with all the modern
stuff this brings with it.
2 Not being able to fiddle with my old computer setup. I arrived late
on Tuesday and barely was able to gopher around a bit.
So let's dig back a bit and let me tell you about the current system
I'm running
Hardware
This is a Dell Wyse 3030 "Terminal". The original version came out
sometimes in 2014 under a slightly different name and with more
storage, being a Windows-based thin client. My system being the
Linux-based thin client, 4 gigabytes of MMC storage have to
suffice.
Powered by a dual core Celeron, able to hit 2.17 Ghz. Of course,
while doing the OCC thing, it's clamped down to 1 core and the
minimum possible CPU frequence, which is 500 Mhz.
2 gigs of RAM, minus what the GPU uses, OS limits this to 512 Mb
during this frugal week.
Speaking of the GPU, it has two display ports, one of which
is currently equipped with a DVI dongle, connecting it to my
main monitor, a glorious 23 inch "Cinema Display HD" from Apple.
Yes, the acrylic monstrosity from 2002. On its three feet, it's
always angled slightly back, the total bezel area is larger than
some other displays, and the color fidelity isn't as good as you
see on contemporary IPS or even OLED screens.
But I love it, and I'm not just using it for this challenge, it
has been my main display for most of the year.
Software
In my previous post here, I've said that I'm just going to put
Slackware on that machine, and be done with it.
Well, that didn't work out. Slackware doesn't have a high opinion
about dependency management for its packages, so it works best when
you just install the whole shebang on your machine.
Granted, this is quite okay with most systems. Even if you include
all the desktop environments, the total Linux kernel source and
a full-fledged LaTeX environment, you're not breaking 20 gigs.
And there's a certain joy about having every piece of software
at your immediate beck and call. Want to try that weird editor,
KDE app or programming language? It's there, no need to even
install a package. It's what made exploring a Linux system fun
for me in the late 90s.
Alas, I don't have 20 gigs here. I tried a few things:
1 Manually selecting packages to get a minimal system.
Didn't work out that well, even with moderate demands you
break the 4 Gig limit easily. With some research I probably
could've come up with something that gives me a good GUI
system with no broken dependencies, but I wasn't looking
for spending that much time.
2 Install everything on an external drive. So I grabbed a
64 GB USB 3 stick, connected it to the single USB 3.1
port this machine had, and went along installing.
Only to find out, that the system could boot from there,
but the OS couldn't find its data partition afterwards.
Probably some issue with how external devices are named,
so if I were able to spend the time to find the correct
LILO configuration and initrd invocation, this might
be possible. But again, patience is not my strong suit
right now.
3 Try a more minimal Linux distribution.
I went with Alpine, as I always wanted to try that out,
outside of containers. So a small footprint was a given,
and I checked out how hard it is too install on such
a minimal system.
And to no big surprise, it worked out fine. Granted, as
with all modern systems, once you installed a few
applications and dev environment stuff, the megabytes
accrue, but I got a graphical environment like I had
in the early 00s. More about that later...
As a final note: Of course I'm using the Alpine email
package to read my email on that Alpine operating
system...
