Old Computer Challenge - Day 0, Getting Ready

Last year, I saw some "old computer challenge" reports popping up in my fediverse timeline. I read some of them, and thought it looked like a really fun experiment. When I read those, the event was sadly already over. I promised myself to participate next year and moved to something else.

I know, I know: I'm late to the party. For some reason, I thought this challenge was to begin on the 15th of July, not the 13th. I wasn't ready on Monday, and couldn't find enough time to setup my old laptop.

Speaking about the laptop, let's talk about the constraints. I came up with those:

Use a single core thinkpad x200s.

Setup Guix on that machine.

Limit the laptop bandwidth to 56kbps.

These constraints will obviously not apply for work-related stuff.

That being said, all my hobby/OSS projects will be developped on that old Guix laptop.

You Said Guix?

Distribution-wise, I've been exclusively using and contributing to NixOS for the last 5 years. I became really comfortable with it. Maybe a little bit too much. I've been following the achievements of the Guix community in the meantime.

While I feel more aligned with the NixOS technical choices, I'm really impressed by the social construct behind Guix. They seem to nail down a lot of things NixOS struggle with in that area.

I tried to switch to Guix several times but always ended up being frustrated with it and moving back to NixOS. This challenge seemed like a nice excuse to force myself into using Guix again... ...and hopefully getting comfortable enough with it to contribute to it a bit.

Installing Guix on the Laptop

Installing Guix on the X200s hasn't been a pleasure to say the least.

First, let's address the elephant in the room: Guix is dog slow! Close to umbearably slow. I used NixOS on that computer in the past, while I can't tell it was a painless experience, it was somewhat still interactive.

The initial guix pull took about 1h50 minutes to complete on a 200mbps fiber link. Switching to a new Guix configuration takes easily 2 minutes.

It seems like there's a fair share of performance optimizations to perform to at least close the gap with NixOS here. I plan to explore that a bit during the challenge.

Guix ships with a librelinux kernel. My X200 has a intel wifi card, the firmware blob has to be loaded to it during the boot, meaning you can't use it from a librelinux kernel.

To use a "regular" Linux kernel and load the proprietary iwlwifi firmware to the wifi card, you have to use the non official nonguix repository.

The whole process of install Guix took me a good 3 hours to perform. It was painful.

Gemini

I plan to write a blog article on my website once this experiment is over. However, I wanted to share that experiment on real time as well. However, I'm not really up to spam my blog with lifestyle low-quality articles.

This made me to think: why not create a gemlog? The protocol is a bit more niche than the web, a bit less indexed. Hopefully, these low quality posts will be long gone from any computer memory in 10 years from now :)

Setting up the Gemlog

After asking #old-computer-challenge about their favorite Gemini server, I decided to move on with Agate.

The software was already packaged for NixOS. All I had to do was to write a systemd service running the daemon and an update script automagically updating the Gemlog using a git repo.

I'm going to write the gemlog files manually, including the index for now.

The whole setup process took me about 15 minutes. After the Guix setup process, it was a good surprise :)

That's All Folks

Everything is now set up, I'm ready to start this challenge.

See you tomorrow for a field report of the first day of this experiment.

Gemlog Index