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jmcunx OCC 1

My Old Computer Challenge # 1 Notes

Links to Solene's Challenge Pages:

OCC # 1 (gemini)

OCC # 1 (https)

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.

neofetch screen print (gemini)

r51e on thinkwiki (https)

Workaround for Download Failures

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.

Edimax Wi-Fi 4 802.11n Adapter for wireless (amazon/https)

Creative BT-W2 for Bluetooth Audio (https)

Links about the Challenge

OCC # 1 plus links to other participants (gemini)

KuchiKuu Page Inspired me to create this page (https)

Comics I need to see everyday, all works fine with dillo

XKCD (https)

Sherman's Lagoon (https)

BC (https)

Heathcliff (https)

Frank and Ernest (https)

Bloom County (https)

Echos of Blue Mars -- is my favorite music stream site. Usually I stream via mplayer.

Echos of Bluemars Main Site (http)

Link for use with mplayer (http)

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.

back

back to OCC

back to my capsule

$Id: occ_1.gmi,v 2.6 2023/10/17 14:22:57 jmccue Exp $