,,, jmcunx OCC 5
Old Computer Challenge # 5 (OCC5) Notes, which is
called "there is no challenge".
DIR OCC5, In gopher
HTML OCC5, On the WEB
I take it to mean for OCC 5 (July 13 -- 19, 2025), you
use an Older Computer and prove you do not need to use
the latest and greatest hardware to perform your
tasks.
This OCC5 theme has some meaning in 2025. Microsoft
will soon be forcing people to buy a new system in
order to run Windows. M/S now requires a TPM2 chip
(Trusted Platform Module 2). This means all PCs and
Laptops older then 5 years or so will not run Windows
11. To prevent a massive influx of perfectly good
systems into landfills, we can try and show people
they can install a Linux or a *BSD instead of spending
a lot on a new system.
So I decided to use an old Thinkpad T61 a close
relative gave to me a few months ago. It was sitting
in his closet for many years. After a bit of TLC, it
works like new. I upgraded the memory to 2G and did a
major cleaning.
For this challenge, I could use my main Laptop, a
Thinkpad W541 with Linux. That 10 year old system is
just usable as any new system, but I wanted a bit of a
challenge. Plus I really like the 16:10 screen size
that the T61 (18 years old) has, to me, it is much
better then 16:9 newer systems now uses.
Thinkpad Hardware Spec, from neofetch(1)
=======================================
OS: OpenBSD 7.7 i386 (Day 1)
NetBSD 10.1 i386 (Day 2 - 7)
Host: LENOVO 7661LP3
Resolution: 1440x900
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 (2) @ 1.6
GPU: Mesa Intel(R) 965GM (CL)
Memory: 2006MiB
This means:
===========
I will try to use this system as I would a newer system
and note any oddities.
* Day 7: Saturday July 19: Completed my TODO
goal, I updated a few objects in my repositary
and brought them up to my current standards.
This is the last day of OCC5, it was an
interesting but uneventful week for me. There was
a minor kerfuffle in IRC #oldcomputerchallenge on
Wednesday. I believe it was due to the fact that
for many people there, English is not their first
language. A person who is a native English
speaker took offense to a install comment and
seemed not to understand many people there are not
native English Speakers. Then the conversation
devolved from there. All seems well now.
Using the T61 I was able to perform activities I
normally do on my main PC. So I can say I can do
everything I need to do on this T61 as a can do on
a new Laptop. One caveat, I do not watch Videos
on Laptops or PCs, so I expect if I attempted
that, issues could have occurred.
I can say with confidence, if a person can use
Linux or a *BSD, they have no need to upgrade
their current Windows 10 Laptop. They can just
install Linux/*BSD and save the money they will
have to spend to move to Windows 11.
All in All OCC5 was a fun experience. Plus I
learned one can use Firefox w/NetBSD 10.1 on a
T61 Thinkpad if it has 2G memory!
* Day 6: Friday July 18: made good progress on my
TODO List.
* Day 5, Thursday July 17: Nothing of note happened.
* Day 4, Wednesday July 16: I meant to be
productive, but I got lost in reading Gemini
Capsules and IRC. There are lots of nice capsules
out there!
* Day 3, Tuesday July 15: Nothing exciting for OCC,
worked on my TODO and read some sites and a bit of
nethack. Most of the day was AFK.
But when I got home, I went to daemonforums and
arcticfox crashed. That is OK, but it completely
froze X, I could not even switch to a VT. So I
turned on my main PC, used ssh(1) to reboot. I
then tried netsurf, same issue.
So I decided to install Firefox via pkgin(1), that
seems to work OK. I think it uses maybe 900M mem.
At least I have a method of getting to sites I
cannot uses via lynx, dillo or Emacs EWW. There
are really only a couple of sites that will not
work with those. And I only go to those sites
there at most once/day.
This issue highlights NetBSD's cross compiling,
OpenBSD i386 cannot run Firefox due to rust. That
is because compiling Firefox on OpenBSD i386 now
fails on memory :(
* Day 2, Monday July 14: Went to NetBSD, doing that
is easy since all I needed to do was swap out the
HDD. NetBSD pkgsrc has lightweight browsers other
then just dillo. arcticfox seems to work pretty
good with the T61 and memory usage seems to hover
around 470M. Rest of the day was working with my
TODO list for changes to a couple of utilities in
my repository.
* Day 1, Sunday July 13: I thought OCC5 started
tomorrow. But I was on the T61 today anyway
copying files from my main Laptop. I have not
fully decided if I will use NetBSD or OpenBSD.
Right now I am on OpenBSD because wireguard works
better under OpenBSD. But NetBSD has arcticfox in
pkgsrc, which seems to be a good decent
replacement for Firefox. Changes may be made :)
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