I was goofing around over the weekend, and thought I'd try
to install Plan9 on hardware, having run into difficulty
at the virtualbox attempt. I got further with the hardware
(booted to the gui installer) but still didn't get it
working. Tried 9front as well, with similar results. I'm
guessing my hardware just isn't what they want.
The PC I was testing on was an old Gateway SX2802, which
has a reasonably nice Q8300 Core 2 Quad processor. It's not
new, but it works well. Since Plan9 wasn't cooperating, I
decided to fiddle with a minimal debian 9, mostly so I
could give TinyWM another try. Certainly, there are far
more minimal *nix options, but I wasn't in the mood for
those. I just wanted a console, xinit, and TinyWM, without
a lot of hassle.
Debian was, of course, a breeze to setup. Getting Xorg
working without installing a pre-packaged "desktop
environment" wasn't too hard, but it wasn't automatic
either. Still, there's something I love about just
firing up X when I want it, rather than having a whole
mess of stuff going all the time. And I love knowing that
the only things running under X are the ones I've told
to run at that particular moment.
I made a few changes to TinyWM while I was there, which
you can view in the "software" folder of this gopher hole
if you wish. Basically, I just gave myself the ability
to launch a few things from the root window, plus the
ability to exit TinyWM by mod1+rightclick at 0,0. It
suited me, and was easy enough to drop in. This sort of
behavior is, I think, what TinyWM is for.
Then I started thinking, "if I was going to use this as my
main work machine, what would I need to setup?" This is
where the returns started to diminish.
I love minimalism as a concept, but sometimes I think I
take the idea into unreasonable territory. As I looked at,
I was creating unreasonable requirements for the new
theoretical environment, so that I could qualify it as
"minimal." And there was no real value in the exercise,
beyond the esoteric fascination that I have with the idea.
Minimal computing, as a term, requires scope. You could
determine that anything beyond an abacus or a mechanical
computer isn't "minimal." You could also say that anthing
that doesn't have a gui is too minimal. I even know humans
that think if it can't run MSFT Windows and the latest 3D
games, it's less than minimal; it might as well be an
abacus for them. The term is meaningless without scope.
In my mind, the scope that I automatically adopt when I
think of minimal computing is based on my own personal
history with computers. The "tfurrows Ultimate Minimal
Computer" is an x86 machine that runs an operating system
with a long history (*nix), that is capable of running
"archaic" programs without emulation (*nix again), that
doesn't require new-fangled programs to get work done,
but that can interact with a new world of computing
without choking to death (read: internet.)
My idea is, by many measures I'm sure, not really
"minimal." I suppose a better term might be something
like "modern workload minimal." Yes, that is also
subjective, but I think it's better than just "minimal."
To make a long story longer, I gave up playing with the
sx2802 and I went and read a book. Right now at least,
I just don't have time for my ultimate minimal setup...
It's absurd, but I suppose many of my pursuits are.
