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Adam's occ23

http://occ.deadnet.se

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.

Day 1

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 1 other than getting it set up and writing this for my onw future reference. Here's to hoping it goes well.

Day 2

Screenshots

...via http, sorry

http://adamthiede.com/Files/setup.png

http://adamthiede.com/Files/netsurf-prefs.png

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.

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