,,, jmcunx OCC 1
Old Computer Challenge 1 Notes
Link to Solene's Challenge Page:
================================
DIR Solene's OCC1 Challenge
gemini://perso.pw/blog/articles/old-computer-challenge.gmi
My Notes
========
I decided to join the Old Computer Challenge using a
Thinkpad R51e. Below, you can see a screen print and
information from neofetch.
GIF neofetch screen print
r51e on thinkwiki
https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/category:r51e
As you can see above, it exceeds the original
requirements. It matches on everything except for
memory. In the print I had reduced the memory to 1G,
but doing that caused the CPU Temperature to peg at 80C
(175F) when doing minor activities. So I chickened out
and re-added the 1G to bring it back to 2G.
So yes, I "cheated" a bit, but being card carrying wimp I
had no guilt. Actually it was not really cheating since
I was using a system built around 2005. Maybe with more
time I can come up with more rationalizations :)
I never used the R51e for such a long period of time,
but I do use it every once in a great while for nostalgia
and to backup important files. A friend gave it to me a
few years ago. She moved to a MAC and it was sitting idle
for quite a while. If you look at it, you would think it
was brand new, she really took good care if it.
Hardware Items
==============
* I really really like the 4:3 resolution.
* Sleep works in a way, but about 80% of the time my
X display gets corrupted on resume. So, I need to
power off when done for the day.
* Battery, maybe 10 to 15 minutes, so more like a cheap
UPS instead of a real Laptop Battery. Eventually I
may see if I can find a better one.
* For the Tin Foil Hat Crowd, there is no Intel ME
and no TPM on this system -- yeah :)
* As noted above, I needed to use 2G memory (its max)
due to CPU Temperature. I did not want it to catch
fire :)
* The largest issue is wireless. When not working I can
use an ethernet cable, but at Work (home), were my
pandemic office is, I need to use wireless. Wireless
is very flaky (more on that below).
* When I power up, I need to wait a bit to allow
OpenBSD to re-link the kernel. I noticed once in a
great while, I would get a panic when logging into
xenodm(1). I have not seen this occur since I started
waiting for ld(1) to complete.
* A bit cramped on disk space. I needed to be careful
when downloading any large files.
The WEB
=======
* Firefox is a no-go
* In spite of what I just said directly above, I
needed to start Firefox to upload this page to my
site. The provider uses cPanel, so I made a brave
attempt. After multiple tries and a few Firefox core
dumps, I gave up and uploaded using my Daily Driver.
So far, this is the only issue I ran across without
a work-around.
* Discovered dillo is great for testing changes made
to my WEB Pages on my local system.
* dillo works fine, but has issues with some images
and some WEB pages.
* An IRC User also in this challenge
(#old-computer-challenge) pointed me to links+. Links
allowed me to view WEB pages dillo could not handle.
* Accessing on-line services like Amazon, ebay and
banks is a "fail". But personally, I hardly ever use
those sites. Just once per month I download a bank
statement. So in reality, for the sites I care about,
I am fine.
* There are some sites I would visit that failed on
this system. So during this challenge I just did
without, and I did not suffer any withdrawals :)
Other Items
===========
* mutt - via IMAPS for gmail and personal email
* tin - for usenet
* irssi - for IRC
* gvim - works great, but syntax highlighting can slow
it down in very rare cases
* Emacs - no issues
* Various games - nethack (hardfought), tetris (part
of OpenBSD base) and a few other simple ones, all
work fine.
* Music streaming - Creative BT-W2 (below) works great
with the R51e, better than Bluetooth I have used
under some Linux distros.
* Testing programs and scripts for work. These are
command line only items for back-end processing,
I never learned GUI toolkits. I found OpenBSD can
catch memory issues by default. To do that on other
Operating Systems, I would need to install a special
package(s), which I am really to lazy to setup. On
the R51e, no issues except for speed, which is not
really a big deal.
Wireless
========
* Wireless -- During the competition, I could not
connect the R51e directly to the ISP provided
Modem, it seems to have something that prevents old
wireless chips from connecting. But I did connect
an old router to the ISP's modem via a cable then
connect to the old router. That worked in a fashion,
but I experienced lots of network drops. In 2022,
I ended up getting a Edimax Wi-Fi 4 802.11n Adapter
(amazon) and this dongle solved the wireless issues.
* Dongles used:
Edimax Wi-Fi 4 802.11n Adapter for wireless (amazon)
Creative BT-W2 for Bluetooth Audio
Links about the Challenge
=========================
KuchiKuu Page Inspired me to create this page
https://kuchikuu.xyz/old-computer-challenge.html
Comics I need to see everyday, all works fine with dillo
XKCD https://xkcd.com/
Sherman's Lagoon https://www.gocomics.com/shermanslagoon
BC https://www.gocomics.com/bc
Heathcliff https://www.gocomics.com/heathcliff
Frank & Ernest https://www.gocomics.com/frank-and-ernest
Bloom County https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty
Echos of Blue Mars -- is my favorite music stream site.
Usually I stream via mplayer.
Echos of Bluemars Main Site
http://echoesofbluemars.org/
Link for use with mplayer
http://streams.echoesofbluemars.org:8000/bluemars
Epilogue
========
So far, this is working fine, I do notice a moderate speed
difference when compared to my usual daily system. But
all in all, for me, this is still a usable system.
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