💾 Archived View for adamthiede.com › log › 2023-10-28.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:35:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Today I finally got around to booting up the old Vaio PC.
The Vaio PCV-RS411 was a gift from a friend. The friend's sister owned it. Coming from a family of teachers, they weren't well off, and they had few nice things. Those things they learned to treat well. This Vaio is no exception - it's in great condition, only recently scarred from a trip in the car from its former owner's house, four hours away.
A few weeks ago I attempted a boot up, but there was no video output. I have 2 PCI graphics cards, and neither of those worked either. I figured a serial cable would help me diagnose any problems and gave up until I could get one. Fast forward a few weeks, and, serial cable in hand, I made my way to the basement again. In a last ditch effort prior to attaching the serial cable, I removed the modem card and the GPU in case those were the source of any issues. Turns out that the modem card was somehow the problem all along, and I got video out on the integraded graphics.
Of my stack of increasingly aging x86 operating system CDs, OpenBSD 6.9 was the most familiar, so I decided to load that up. There CDN doesn't host the package or patches for that release anymore, so I had to use another mirror to get to a supported release: `sysupgrade http://ftp.eu.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD` stepped 6.9 -> 7.0 -> 7.1 -> 7.2 -> 7.3 and then I could `pkg_add`.
With a few browsers (lynx and amfora) and some nice-to-have utilities (vim and rsync) running cwm, it's a pretty comfy experience. With a Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM, this machine is still plenty capable. Even more responsive than the netbook I used during OCC 2023 despite being half a decade older. (And 2003-2009 means a lot more than 2018-2023, in terms of computing capability.) It can't properly wake from sleep, and its CMOS battery is dead, and it won't recognize a USB keyboard and mouse unless it's plugged in on boot, but it's cool that this relatively old computer can run modern software without skipping a beat.
