For quite some years, I spend summer vacations with my in-laws, in a tiny mountain parish in central Portugal. The area is rural, a testimony to dying agricultural Europe. There is an annex, the annex hosts goods collected over decades. The valuables include 6 CRT TVs, countless radios, perhaps, a thoroughly cataloged archive of the local newspaper and some culinary magazines.

Among them, an old laptop was found. Inquiring the public, the sheer view of its PS/2 and DB-25 ports brings people joy. Concurrent to the finding, the Old Computer Challenge is occurring - the stars aligned and, spontaneously, I decided to participate.

Experimentee

Compaq Presario 2500, a notebook from 2003, comes into play; mobile Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, Radeon RV280, 15 inches XGA display. For its time, and still, the computer is powerful - actually, in 2000-2006 my home PC was a P3 with rather useless Riva TNT2. That machine could barely run Morrowind at 640x480, with FPS dropping to a slideshow during the sand storms.

This year brings no challenge. Therefore, I will simply install a modern OS, and dailydrive the machine for a week, or even to the end of the month. An easy mode, as personal computing of mine, particularly during the break, is limited to superficial text processing and light browsing. Frankly, to use no computer at all would totally be feasible. But, since I don’t deal with IT at my day job, I don’t hate sitting in front of the screen at free time.

Day -1, preparations

Money was spent on a universal charger. Eventually, the notebook started - flexing with Windows XP. The way I remember things, the system was way snappier than it turned out to be.

I had a USB key, a single empty CD disk to use as last resort, and a plastic bag of dated floppy disks, of questionable origin and state. The single hiccup was the inability to boot from a thumb drive, the only removable option being the floppy. Plop Boot Manager (not FOSS, but freeware) kick-started the adventure. The floppies in my possession were tested, took 4 or 5 trials to find an uncorrupted diskette and to write successfully plpbt image. To do so, I used Rawwrite, portable software is so good.

The bootloader started, but boot from USB called for a ritual. Somehow, the thumbdrive could be plugged only after the start of the boot manager, to initiate the boot “S-Ret” had to be pressed. Different USB modes were tested - to no avail.

Day 0

Как я грабил корованы

This computer belongs to my sister-in-law. It was her very first - thus, there is some attachment. At first, I was strictly prohibited from nuking the hard drive. I thought to play with persistent live OSs, and test whether I could manage to do casual computing wielding a thumb drive exclusively. This was the only challenge one could think of, and said challenge ended in failure.

NomadBSD (i386/UFS) was probed. The thinking was as follows: certainly, for such a dated machine XFCE and other defaults are heavy, but to degrade the system ad hoc should be doable. And I have to admit - it worked, somewhat partially. In a vanilla state, X session started, the desktop environment worked. The usability was nil, of course, and let it go. A pledge was made to break the system into a state more minimal, configs were adjusted. From here, I could pilot plain X11, but with some bumps: too little space in tmpfs, erratic input of characters at rather random moments (absolutely no idea why), few other things to tackle.

The end of this rope was sighted early on. Booting was way too frail, with kernel loading issues for a good half of the attempts, and frequent inability to even find the boot device - issues stemming from the hardware being dated. I conceded and moved on.

FreeBSD

My sister-in-law, a woman kind and merciful, allowed me to wipe the original system. As per the previous exercise, that FreeBSD scores home was clear.

A second, and a major cause to fly with FreeBSD was on a personal side. To date, this is the only minimal system that I’m able to cook to a rare, but usable desktop. At least, I did it twice during the past year, the handbook contributes significantly - its excellence is not a meme. To compare, 2012 was the last time I played with Arch Linux, or any other “advanced” distro. All hell breaks loose, let’s seize the moment for a confession: I am a naughty being and don’t like tilings, on desktop I use GNOME Fedora, and Unity was a great DE.

With that, I was reluctant to build an environment from scratch. Yet, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do - with limited resources, MATE (a DE I prefer) was not an option at all. MATE is relatively hungry, actually. I went with OpenBox, to perfect this setup I would refer to the seminal vermaden’s series.

Things were configured to a workable state, pretty straightforward. A minor blip came from Emacs - native compilation eats all resources, must be disabled, (setq native-comp-deferred-compilation nil). vterm and pdf-tools demand troubleshooting too.

From here on, my Old Computer Challenge begins. That said, it’s splendid that a brand-new OS (14.3) runs well on a thingamajig that’s almost a quarter-century old.

Days 1-5: Basics

General

So, the NomadBSD issue with random characters and faulty inputs? Turned out to be a hardware problem - eventually, the key “i” stopped responding too, a vimmer’s nightmare. Sick that the keyboard gave up, with so many gentler points of failure available. To keep the venture going, I had to fish an old (unpleasant, mushy, dusty, sticky) keyboard. The faulty device was disabled in X sessions only using xinput.

With an older OS version the setup would be easier: some packages were lacking for 14:latest. FreeBSD/i386 is demoted, and to expect a toll on non-base software is fair. But it was annoying nevertheless, and it is great to get some negative experience with this matter.

Writing and Reading

Here my habits did not change significantly. I transferred my small naive Emacs config, with minor changes: autocompletion and the related stuff were disabled, why have it been running in the text mode to start with I don’t know, org-roam was turned off too. Spell checking is done with aspell, via flycheck and flycheck-aspell plugins. As querying the Internet to check a word or its use-cases was not an option anymore, local dictionaries were thought of. I tried StarDict, 20-30 Mb RAM - a CLI alternative is available, but I refrained from the solutions too minimalistic. As for the dictionary itself, Wiktionary (StarDict format) did most things required.

As for the homepage and blog, this machine was in use from day 0, Hugo responded just a little slower. I had to use imagemagick to do some basic work with pictures, for the second or third time ever - as I did this week with many other CLI tools.

Secluded in the mountains of Lusitania, I don’t research or work with literature. Usually, I rely on Paperpile, in given circumstances it won’t work. As painted below, the overall web experience was horrible - and reinforced thoughts to switch back to Zotero in foreseeable future. To read PDFs, this month lined solely with the recent Salvage issue, Emacs and pdf-tools were used, I did not try anything else.

Web

The Internet was quite an experience, persistently challenging, often infuriating. The sad look the modern web has through lightweight browsers is an eye opener. A funny epitome were the developer platforms, let’s take GitHub or Codeberg - to curl README or bits of project’s wiki turned to be easier than to navigate the botched webpage.

Suffice to say, any website (so, most all of them) that does some form of captcha was unusable.

I surfed (suffered misspelled) with two programs, eww (Emacs built-in text browser) and Dillo. Not many alternatives were explored - some richer options were tested, but the performance was too poor. Of note, eww did the job better, it flattens sites really well. But, trying to keep the setup GUI-centric, I’ve been doing most browsing with Dillo. I can’t say Dillo works that well, whether the browser or modern web to take the blame I don’t know. Actually, I’ve started to write down the list of websites that look descent, but the task quickly became tedious. An irony itself, the page that looks poopy is mine.

IRC and messaging were a no-brainer, I am an XMPP user anyway. Pidgin was used for both, the previous time I ran it was 2012, the dawn of Telegram era. Pidgin is still a perfect messenger, I like the interface a lot - what I don’t like is lack of OMEMO in the vanilla install.

A less expected conundrum, and a problem to think about later were emails. Tuta and other web-interface-only services were clearly off, Gmail tightened security too. I wanted to use Claws Mail, but to pair it with Google is far from being trivial. An approach using an application password worked, but was not persistent. As to tackle this problem required a proper browser at hand (and time, of course), the ball was dropped.

To keep Claws for RSSs only would be silly, alternatives were sought. Emacs is incrementally becoming a cornerstone; to read the feeds, I used the elfeed plugin, and will certainly continue doing so.

Day 4-7: Multimedia, Games

The video card was a weak spot, and 14:3 left me with vesa. Likely, a proper driver could work for a system older. The sound was not available out of the box - to make it right, snd_driver was loaded. Restrained with my skills, the computer remained in an underpowered potato state - foolish, considering its specs.

I did not watch videos or listened to music. But, as the pinnacle of ergonomics, the battle station proudly presented on the photo below shows, video games were played.

To my wife’s distress, I spent few late evenings deflecting Antarans in MoO2/DOSBox - and, by the way, MoOs parts one and two are the finest examples of games that age well.

Then, few things were run through Wine. Heroes 3 did not start, unless supplemented with the HD+ mode. It took some trials to tune the settings for a better performance (stretchable 32-bit GDI, stretch filter off, full screen XGA, if matters). The game felt a little clumsy, but was totally playable. I finished “The Mandate of Heaven” scenario, which is great for obvious reasons.

Thoughts

Actually, I am keeping up, untill the end of the month. While on vacation and with minuscule scenarios of usage, an advanced typewriter with very basic connectivity satisfies my needs. Of course, I cheat - I still use phone, the challenge therefore is bogus.

New things were learned. As stated earlier, window managers, hacky solutions, fine customizations don’t interest me. I often choose software for sane defaults. dunst, feh, and other tools alike won’t settle on my PCs. With one exception, dmenu is addictively useful - this r/unixporn staple stays.

Emacs was of very little trouble. My tasks are simple, but the fact that the tool, with almost no adjustments, is transferable between machines of great difference feels right. I will explore which other things make sense to run within Emacs, without taking it to extremes. I would also like to explore more offline solutions, particularly dictionaries. Unfortunately, while this is not really a problem for major languages, to find flavors of Swedish dictionaries in public domain and in suitable formats is hard.

The aspects left untouched were banking, authorizations, all those modern services that are essential and require either a phone or a contemporary browser (often, Chrome-based). Even emails were deliberately overlooked. I live in a society that takes pride in calling itself digital, and I suspect that one bad election could turn a digital society into a digital GULAG. The question therefore: how many elections or dramatic events elsewhere separate my naturalized citizenship from an enemy alien status - just as certain accounts are dismissed as an “unavoidable collateral damage”, the quote is direct? I should at least start storing emails offline, and, while there are some Social Credits left, learn also how to buy a ticket for that last ship to Argentina.