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I'm participating in the Old Computer Challenge this year, using an old nebook running Alpine Linux. I'll make an entry in this directory each day about my successes and failures.
on IRC I go by 'elagost'.
The Old Computer Challenge is going on again this year. I'm going to be using an Acer Aspire One netbook. It has a single CPU, and a stick of RAM that sometimes thinks it's 900M, and sometimes thinks it's 2G. I've limited it to 512M and CPUs to 1 (on the kernel command line: nr_cpus=1 mem=512M) so we'll see how that goes.
This machine was given to me by a neighbor, and it was in practically new condition. The battery actually works which is pretty great for a laptop from 2008. Today, I disassembled it fully, and found a few interesting facts.
There is a second mini-pcie slot under the palm rest. It won't recognize a wifi card or an ssd. Possibly it's for one of those broadcom h264 accelerator cards?
This thing gets pretty hot for a as low-power as it should be. Using a kill-a-watt, I measured it pulling 17W at the wall with a full battery, just with vim in a tty, at lowest brightness. That's really weirdly high for an atom netbook.
The heatsink is just an aluminum plate with a thermal pad on it. There is a fan and it's not great. I would replace the thermal paste, but as anyone who does this stuff knows, it's hard to replace a pad with paste - it's too thick.
While almost full-size the keyboard is just small enough to be noticeable. But the keys are in all the right places. It has a menu key, and the brightness keys work without a handler program. It's pretty cool!
I'm using Alpine Linux 3.18, with the kernel from Alpine Linux 3.17 (Linux 5.15), because there are graphical glitches on the newer kernel. I've yet to report the bug since I found it this morning.
I've had to set "HandleLidSwitch=ignore" in /etc/elogind/logind.conf because if I don't, the laptop will suspend every 30 seconds. I'm not sure if the switch is broken or if the driver is not great.
I'm not doing much on day 0 other than getting it set up and writing this for my onw future reference. Here's to hoping it goes well.
...via http, sorry
i3 is actually pretty slick for this netbook. Since I already use alpine linux with i3/sway on my main computers, this was a breeze to get set up.
The setup.png screenshot is before I set up the limiting, which I do with 'mem=512M' on the command line, and a script to disable the hyperthreading. '/sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control' can contain 'on' or 'off', and putting 'off' in there disables SMT, so I'm down to one core.
Netsurf's preferences are pretty broken but I figure I'll just browse the web most of the time from a terminal browser. This will reduce my browsing a lot, which is probably for the best.
This setup feels a bit unfair - I don't really feel like it's lacking anything for me in any way. I'm perfectly happy with it, but for the web browsing. Next week I am traveling a bit, and I am tempted now to take this little netbook instead of my X220. We'll see.
In the evening I had to set up a file upload portal for my mom, so I spun up a nextcloud VPS. I had to cheat and use my main computer for that, since it was time sensitive and the mini machine would have been far too slow! I did the config over ssh on the Challenge netbook, but the web interface work was done with my "normal" computer.
The main drawback of this laptop is the physical aspect, not the slowness. The palmrest is tiny and hurts to use, and the whole thing gets so hot! How and why? These systems shouldn't be this toasty. I may try and use the other netbook I have from this era and see if it can hold out better.
Going well so far. I'm appreciating the size, but still not the palmrest. It's getting uncomfortable enough where I just want to use my thinkpad x220 instead and limit its resources, but I can't on my x86_64 systems, because they need 1GB of RAM to decrypt the LUKS disk.
IRC has been fun! It's nice to be a "part" of something. Tonight I'll have to go through and read everyone's posts.
I've updated the LUKS key on my x220 to only use 250M of memory so I might use that now:
cryptsetup luksAddKey --pbkdf-memory 256000 /path/to/volume
I deleted the old key. Figure I'll add a new one once this is over with the full 1GB of RAM.
We had friends over so I didn't do much computer stuff. Got Haiku installed on another low end netbook, and played around with that for about 2 minutes. It is currently using 2 CPUs (1 core with SMT) and 1GB RAM, and I don't know how to limit it in Haiku, so it doesn't quite qualify for the challenge, but it's esoteric enough that I think it's in the spirit of the challenge. I'll see if I can get it memory/cpu limited tomorrow, or just swap out the RAM - weirdly enough I have lots of spare DDR2 sticks and one of them is 512M.
Most of my browsing has been done in lynx (http and gopher), amfora (gemini), and a netsurf fork called Neosurf. It only took a few minutes to build into an alpine package on this laptop.
Despite having several usable web browsers I've found that I don't use them much.
Alpine Linux is proving to be very usable. I'm using 137 MB RAM right now, running i3, a bunch of xterms, an IRC client, XMPP client, Neosurf, lynx, and amfora open. I'm running the irc client via tmux on my arm board, which I normally do anyway, so I don't think that's cheating. I'm not offloading any of my tasks that I otherwise wouldn't - the web server still runs the web and gemini sites; I've not migrated _it_ to a netbook.
The keyboard on this laptop is frankly pretty bad and that's getting to me, but luckily I have an external thinkpad keyboard, which makes this thing a whole lot more usable.
I played around with Haiku on the other laptop, but am probably going to spend most of the evening writing a few things, or reading. I'm kind of shocked at how normal this machine and its limitations have started to feel after only a few days. To quote 'bsandro' from the IRC:
I'm starting to fear what if by the end of this week I realize I don't even need the main 'beefy' computer anymore :D
Me too! At least maybe I'll be pulling one of the sticks of RAM out of my X220.
It's Thursday - an in-office day. Likely I will not be using my personal computer much beyond this brief update. I'm bringing my pinephone in case I have to access a password manager or something, but it can remain off most of the day.
I tried to limit the pinephone by regenerating its /boot/boot.scr file from /boot/boot.txt, and passing the command line arguments mem=512M maxcpus=1. I even checked the luks keys to make sure they didn't need more memory. But it was not to be - luks refused to decrypt, and the pinephone's output at osk_sdl is not as helpful as on a regular machine. I'll leave it alone, for now.
Friday - even a shorter day than yesterday, it feels like. I slept poorly so haven't done much computing that's not work related. I had to cheat and use another computer to download and print something. Tomorrow I'm going to have to end the challenge prematurely, since I'm traveling and need to bring my real computer.
This challenge has been fun. Right now I'm too tired to make any sort of philosophical synthesis about what I've learned. Suffice to say the modern web sucks and I didn't miss it. IRC still rocks. Gopher and Gemini are cool. Minimal software is timeless, even if the machine is not.
Next year I'll get my really old laptop out for this. It's got 32MB of RAM and a Pentium 2. No wireless. It's a delight - I'd have to find software for it that I could reasonably use. But I have a strong desire to do this again.
Moved some files from my Challenge computer over to my X220, to go back to using the "normal" computer for my short trip. Because of OCC, I've also changed some of the software I use to feel simpler. I switched over to using "terminus" fonts, went from waybar or a complex i3status config to just load, battery, and time. And for when that's even too much, I have a tmux config that I can run from the TTY that'll give me a desktop-ish feeling.
Intentional deprivation is always fun for me. Sometimes I try to only take cold showers, go without coffee, give up video games (not that I play a lot anyway), or abstain from music and podcasts for a bit.
Looking at my pstree, I'm thinking about what I actually really need. How much can I go without? Do I need logind, and polkit? Can I entirely remove flatpaks from my system? Should I go without distrobox and put the compilers directly in my OS? How should I change my life in response to this great experience I've had? Lots to think about. Hopefully I don't backslide too much after this.
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