Hi! Today, I started the 3rd edition of the Old Computer Challenge. And it's not going well, I didn't prepare a computer before, because I wanted to see how easy it would be.
The thing is that I have some other laptops around, but I'd have to prepare them with full disk encryption and file synchronization to have my passwords, GPG and SSH keys around.
With this challenge, in its first hour, I realized my current workflows don't allow me to use computers with 512 MB of memory, this is quite sad. A solution would be to use the iBook G4 laptop that I've been using since the beginning of the challenges, or my T400 running OpenBSD -current, but they have really old hardware, and the challenge is allowing some more fancy systems.
I'd really like to try Alpine Linux for this challenge, let's wrap something around this idea.
If you joined the challenge, here is a previous guide to limit the memory of your system:
For this challenge, you also need to use a single core at lowest frequency.
On OpenBSD, limiting the CPU frequency is easy:
Still on OpenBSD, limiting your system to a single core can be done by booting on the bsd.sp kernel, which doesn't support multithreading.