Old Computer Challenge

While I was on vacation for a week, Solène posted an invitation to an Old Computer Challenge¹. I didn't have an old-enough computer on hand to start on time (on the 10th). Today's the 13th, and I'm settled in at home enough to start setting up an appropriate computer. Here's how it's going.

The "old computer" specs are:

1 CPU maximum, whatever the model. This mean only 1 CPU|Core|Thread. Some bios allow to disable multi core.

512 MB of memory (if you have more it's not a big deal, if you want to reduce your ram create a tmpfs and put a big file in it)

using USB dongles is allowed (storage, wifi, Bluetooth whatever)

only for your personal computer, during work time use your usual stuff

Setup

Though I have fond memories of using computers around this spec, I don't have one that I've kept. My secondary computer around 2005 was a PIII laptop with 256MB of RAM, manufactured around 2000, and that would have been ideal for the challenge. I gave it away some time ago, though. Right now, my oldest computer is not my lowest-spec computer. For most things day-to-day, I use a ThinkPad X230, manufactured in 2012. It's been upgraded with an SSD and 8GB of RAM, so besides the low DPI screen, it's plenty for my daily needs. My lowest-spec computer that I still have is a 2013 ASUS eeePC. It's not quite suitable for the challenge. Its Intel Atom processor is (probably?) 2 cores, and it has 2GB of RAM. But that's easily resolved by passing the mem=512MB and maxcores=1 kernel parameters at boot time.

It's currently running the XFCE spin of Fedora 34 (so very up-to-date), though I'm actually using i3wm on it. I hear there's an i3 Fedora spin now, but whatever. I’m a little concerned that my base system is too heavy. Besides being a current distribution, it’s also x86_64. I should really reinstall this machine as 32-bit, assuming they’re distributing a 32-bit install image. I *expect*, it would be slightly more memory-efficient.

Experiences

Currently, I’m still doing setup on this, which means using my bigger laptop a little bit. I expected to be able to:

Read the smol-net on Emacs with elpher

Publish smol-net stuff with Emacs

Participate in my group chats with Profanity for XMPP and gomuks for Matrix, in a terminal window. Getting these both set up was a little difficult, but okay.

Do *some* Common Lisp development in Emacs.

View *some* graphical websites in NetSurf, text-friendly ones in Emacs eww.

SSH into my mail server to check my mail (Don’t have disk space to set up mbsync and mu4e on this little machine).

This is honestly, other than render-unto-Caesar activities like paying bills online, most of what I want to be able to do on my home machine, anyway. Stretch goal of playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. This laptop doesn’t have Bluetooth, and sound only works with plugged-in headphones, so I will probably continue to use my phone for media consumption. This computer also isn’t capable of playing 480p video, even when not limiting the RAM and CPU, so that I’ll do elsewhere, too.

Here’s an early screenshot:

Old computer screenshot (PNG, 59Kb)

Adjustments

I got Profanity and Gomuks installed, so my chats worked. Updated my emacs config, and ran it, and my X session got OOM-killed. I checked, and I didn’t have any swap set up other than zram, so that’s kind of to be expected. I added 512MB of swap. Also switched to runlevel 3 (or the systemd equivalent) to save some memory.

Been working purely on the console for a while, but will probably go back to i3, if only for better Unicode text support! My current console font supports *some* unicode characters, including at least Latin-1, Latin-2, and box-drawing, but xfce4-terminal and the right fonts installed supports practically everything. I *may* run a graphical Emacs, too, now that I’ve sorted some things out.

While writing this, I noticed that Emacs was periodically freezing, for quite a long time. I thought it was emacs-native-comp freezing things while it compiled things in the background, but it was actually garbage collection! Been a few years since I actually noticed garbage collection in Emacs. Adjusted my early-init.el to set garbage collection threshold very high when starting up, then rather low after startup finishes. That seems to have resolved the issue.

¹Old Computer Challenge