Old Computer Challenge y3

http://occ.deadnet.se

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.

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