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This year's Old
Computer Challenge runs from Monday 10th July 2023 and
finishes on Sunday 16th July. People are documenting the challenge
using...
My project for the week of the challenge is to use graphical applications as much as possible to get some maths teaching notes written.
I'm using my Thinkpad T42 with one Centrino core pegged at 600MHz
and 512Mb of physical RAM. The 40Mb hard drive rotates at a
stately 5400 rpm.
startxMy previous Old Computer Challenge pages are
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I'm editing this Web page in Seamonkey's graphical Web page editor. Some of the mark-up might be a bit redundant but the Web pages usually render OK on most Web browsers.
I'm just reading through some of the Web/gopher/gemini pages
linked from http://occ.deadnet.se/.
I've subscribed to the mailing list that Tekk has kindly set up: I
used the old convention of sending an email to the address given
with subject 'subscribe'. It hasn't bounced which is a good sign,
but I have not yet had any kind of automatic reply from the list
manager software.
Below is the output from free -m with Seamonkey's
three components running in a single thread, UXTerm and fluxbox...
bash-5.1$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 480 314 20 25 146 127
Swap: 1023 75 948
As you can see the T42 is using a tiny bit of swap. The key to managing a slow computer is to have a good idea what task you want to work on and load just the software you need. This morning is Web and mail. Tomorrow will be mostly OpenOffice and LyX.
Below is part of the output from cpufreq-info...
current policy: frequency should be within 600 MHz and 1.70 GHz.
The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 600 MHz.
cpufreq stats: 1.70 GHz:0.30%, 1.40 GHz:0.04%, 1.20 GHz:0.03%, 1000 MHz:0.05%, 800 MHz:0.14%, 600 MHz:99.45% (1028)
I'm using Slackware's 'huge.s' kernel (the T42 can't support a
PAE kernel) which I suspect is built with the ondemand CPU
governor configured. My /etc/rc.d/rc.local file has
the following commands which kick in when the kernel switches to
userland...
bash-5.1$ cat /etc/rc.d/rc.local #!/bin/bash # # /etc/rc.d/rc.local: Local system initialization script. # cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave powertop --auto-tune
So I think that I am as close as I can be to the rules without building a custom kernel.
bash-5.1$ echo "/cgi-bin/submit?gopher://sdf.org/1/users/kpb" | nc occ.deadnet.se 70
Sorry, you already submitted something today.
You can try again in a few hours
I was quite pleased to see this error message as it means that
the server at occ.deadnet.se has received my earlier
submission of this Web site. It took me an embarrassingly long
period of time to work out that you have to use the commands given
at occ.deadnet.se from a command line and not
a gopher browser (lynx in my case). Good old Slackware has netcat
(nc) already installed.
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Things that worked:
rsync from uxterm to copy
work to an external USB hard drive and to online storageThings that didn't work
oom_reaper
closing the browserResponsiveness
Reflection
Some of the other participants are using P3/256Mb based laptops,
even one with 128Mb. These participants tend to be using command
line applications (e.g mutt for email).
One participant is using an operating system contemporary with
their laptop which is a nice idea. That would give me Windows 2000
or Slackware 10.2 to 11 for this laptop (2004 to 2006 model
availability). I know that Windows 2000 and Office 2000 would work
very quickly on this machine. I used Windows 2000 at work in early
2000s and it was fine on a P120 (Pentium 3 I think) with 256Mb of
RAM. Slackware 10.2 looks like a bit of a challenge to get working
- I'd have to modify a testing 2.6 series kernel and manually
install kernel modules for the WiFi. KDE 3.5 and Xfce version 4.6
should fly though.
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Didn't spend that much time on screens today. I did email and
some Web surfing this morning. Right now I'm compiling GNU Octave on the T42 using the
semi-official slackbuild.
Actually, I'm part way through compiling OpenBLAS
which is a dependency. Below is the first few lines from top
bash-5.1$ top -b -n 1
top - 20:09:41 up 2:25, 3 users, load average: 1.14, 1.30, 1.32
Tasks: 141 total, 2 running, 139 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 80.8 us, 19.2 sy, 0.0 ni, 0.0 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 480.9 total, 66.0 free, 221.2 used, 193.7 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 1024.0 total, 967.2 free, 56.8 used. 237.8 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4547 root 20 0 47628 22664 15844 R 69.6 4.6 0:00.34 cc1
4545 keith 20 0 5128 2964 2428 R 4.3 0.6 0:00.05 top
1 root 20 0 2400 1408 1376 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.79 init
As you can see progress is sedate and there is some use of swap.
I have a couple of UXTerm windows going, the various compilers and
build tools that the slackbuild script runs, and Seamonkey's Web
browser component and Composer (page editor) component. One
advantage of using the powersave CPU governor is
that the laptop stays nice and cool... but compilations proceed in
a sedate manner. The interface remains responsive and Seamonkey is
useable.
bash-5.1$ sensors
acpitz-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
temp1: +44.0°C (crit = +93.0°C)
thinkpad-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
fan1: 2991 RPM
CPU: +44.0°C
GPU: +46.0°C
temp3: +29.0°C
Why am I compiling GNU Octave? Well I thought that I had already compiled Octave packages for Slackware 15.0 but found that they were all 64 bit. Compiling is the usual way of adding software additional to default Slackware install. There are some repositories that provide pre-built binary packages but I could not find a 32 bit Octave build in any of them. SlackOnly is 64 bit only for Slackware 15.0.
Why do I need GNU Octave? I'm teaching myself some linear algebra from Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra for Everyone which I bought a copy of and collected today. The exercises suggest devising simple Matlab commands to explore some of the concepts in a concrete way with actual numerical matrices. Octave uses a similar syntax to Matlab, at least for the basics.
Note added early on Wednesday morning: OpenBLAS took
around three hours to compile and Octave 7.3 itself took 8 hours
or so overnight. With OpenBLAS being mostly highly optimised
fortran routines, cc was mostly in use and the
linking step hammered the swap and CPU. The compilation itself was
fairly calm as mentioned above. Loading Octave and trying to plot
something brings up a plot window that is a blank black slab.
Closing that plot window causes Octave to exit without an error
message. The default qt plot backend isn't happy
about the ancient radeon graphics in the T42. Using graphics_toolkit
("gnuplot") sorted the issue, so that is going in the
startup file.
Real Life: I bought Strang's book from hive.co.uk which is an alternative to Amazon. Hive can deliver books to an independent bookshop that you choose near where you live, and the bookshop that you nominate gets a small cut of the markup on the book. The only problem is that Birmingham does not have a large number of independent bookshops, so I had to go across the city to pick the book up. Exploring the unfamiliar neighbourhood lead to an old-school greasy spoon cafe. Plenty of space, not many people in, no flat screen television, radio on in the background at an almost subliminal volume level. So I stayed there for some time writing (in a notebook with a pen). I'll be typing up some of the stuff tomorrow in Lyx.
Reflection: I've been reading the pages that some of the
other participants are putting up. Quite a range! I think the most
minimal must be the Amiga
CDTV with 9Mb of RAM (not a misprint!) which Steve Lord uses
to process pictures from an old digital camera. I'm thinking along
the lines of trying a Linux distribution that is roughly
contemporary with this T42 laptop and seeing how far I can get.
The limiting factor will always be the Web browser.
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Routine use: Web, email this morning, backup to external
hard drive using rsync, not much new writing. Worked
out some matrix arithmetic with Octave.
Real Life: Summer is holiday time in teaching. I'm just doing sessional work at present so no 'holiday' pay but a holiday vibe so not much screen time. Went out to Wolverhampton for the first time since 2019 - lots of new building in the centre. Some of the new housing looks actually good. Loss of some of the nice 1960s buildings South of the old market. The new market is much smaller than the old one used to be but there was plenty of trading going on. Tram both ways.
Mad science experiment: Downloaded a Blag
Linux 140000 live iso from 2011ish and dd'ed it to a USB
stick. Boots fine and reveals a stunningly responsive Gnome 2
desktop. The Thinkpad T42 dates from around 2005 so using a Linux
that is 6 years later feels about right - you know the drivers
will be sorted. The mad science bit was downloading an appropriate
version of Apache OpenOffice and trying to install it within the
live session. Nearly worked, but there was only 500Mb or so of
user space and I suspect that the Blag live iso could not use the
swap partition on the T42's hard drive as that partition was
created using the recent ext-utils on the Slackware 15.0
installer. The Blag live session ground to a halt as more of the
OpenOffice rpms were installed, and I was running it from a
console window not an Xorg graphical session.
I might try an age-appropriate Debian install - the archive has
the DVD-1 and DVD-2 installer images
available going back to Debian 5 (the one before Squeeze). That is
well enough software available for offline installation, and
guaranteed to be mutually consistent and with all dependencies
available. The kind of thing you need if you are going off grid.
Which I probably would be given the TLS version mismatch with the
older Web browser versions. The limiting factor is always the Web
browser. Again.
Lesson learned: When trying out the Blag live image I
realised that the DNS settings for this Web site is set to
redirect to https for all traffic so I could not actually see this
page. I'm changing the settings to rectify that.
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Never could get the hang of Thursdays: Booted up this
morning for email with coffee and had fsck complain
and Slackware dropped me into a single user session. I had to boot
off the Slackware installer USB and run fsck manually to clear
some dangling inodes and copy them to lost+found.
Looks like last evening's mad science experiment with Blag 140k
resulted in overwriting part of /dev/sda2 which is
the root partition. This is the first time I have ever had to do
this - no major damage done. Unscientific analysis of the files in
lost+found (strings | less) suggests
they were from Seamonkey's cache - nothing irreplaceable - so I
was lucky. I have file system level backups of work but I have not
clonezilla'd the hard drive yet. I might do that tomorrow morning.
Business as usual: Lyx editing a short document and inserting eps charts exported from Gnumeric all worked fine. Need to spend more time on that tomorrow while it rains (forecast is heavy rain). Playing 18 Musicians and writing this now and reading a long email newsletter. Top is saying roughly 0.4 load average and 4% cpu with Audacious, the Seamonkey editor and a couple of UXTerms open.
Better behaved mad science: Debian Squeeze (2009, glibc
2.11) is available as a live iso so I downloaded the Xfce4
version, dd'ed it to a USB stick and booted it before starting
this entry. The small image gives you xfce4, an ancient Iceweasel
(aka Firefox), OpenOffice 3.2.1 and Gimp/Ristretto. Archive
repositories are still available online amazingly but I think I
would probably download DVD-1, install and then
download DVD-2 and mount them both as DVD images and
try to con apt-cd into letting me install packages
from them.
k58.uk should work with old Web browsers now, I have
changed the server settings so that an http request
receives unencrypted pages and an https request
receives encrypted pages.
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Business as usual: Typed up a couple of pages of the probability notes in LyX with some charts exported from Gnumeric as eps files. So I had LyX, Xpdf, Seamonkey Web browser all running and a UXTerm. No sweat, no drama, just a bit of a lag when switching from LyX to Seamonkey to search for how to do something.
Catch 22: I installed Slackware 15.0 and I used the
Slackware installer to make new partitions on the 40Gb IDE drive
in the T42. So of course recent file system utilities. I wanted to
make an image of the entire system before any more mad science
experiments with Debian Squeeze (which looks viable by the way). I
need to use a version of CloneZilla old enough to boot on a
non-PAE machine but which has file system utilities new enough to
cope with my ext4 root partition (/dev/sda2) created
by the Slackware 15.0 installer's cfdisk and mkfs programs. Looks
like no deal if I have interpreted the CloneZilla error log
correctly.
Work-around: One of my external drives is formatted as
exFAT and in theory can handle huge files. So i used a tar
command (corrected version)...
# tar czf /external/image2.tar.gz \
--exclude=/dev \
--exclude=/mnt \
--exclude=/proc \
--exclude=/sys \
--exclude=/tmp \
--exclude=/media \
--exclude=/lost+found/ \
--exclude=/run \
--exclude=/external \
/
The image.tar.gz file will be something like half
the size of the files in /. The command took less
than a couple of hours (I left it cooking after a bit). All the --exclude=
options are to omit directories that change or that are not
actually on the disk. I need to investigate the --one-filesystem
option a bit more.
Restoring the partition (if I decide to abandon the Debian
Squeeze installation) would be done by booting off the installer
USB and untaring the image back to the root of /dev/sda2,
then chroot into the system to run lilo to rewrite the mbr. We
shall see! The forecast tomorrow is thunder and high winds so I'll
give Squeeze a try.
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Mad science update from Debian Squeeze:
Debian provide archived repositories frozen in time!
My /etc/apt/sources.list looks like this...
keith@debian:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list # Archive repositories - no updates! deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ squeeze-lts main contrib non-free # To stop the release file date check add the following custom rule # echo 'Acquire::Check-Valid-Until "false";' >/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90ignore-release-date
...so I can install any software from the huge and nicely aged repository.
The latest Firefox-esr I can use (binaries from the mozilla
archive) is version 45.9. Lots of certificate errors. The default
gnome email client can't cope with the TLS version on my imap
account so it is Web mail for now. But sftp and ssh
work fine? The version of LyX in the Squeeze repository is much
older than the current release and can't edit my files, but
OpenOffice 3.2.1 uses the same file type as OpenOffice 4.1.14 so I
can work on the shape handout tomorrow. The fan control is less
good in Squeeze than in Slackware 15.0 as you might expect, I
might look into the old thinkfan user space control
script. And no Seamonkey in the repositories so I'm editing the
HTML of this page in gedit. Swings and roundabouts.
The sheer performance of Gnome 2.30 on this slow computer does provide food for thought. What are we actually gaining with recent desktop environments? Perhaps accessibility?
Fun fact of the day: I keep an eye on top
now and again when loading the slow computer down with tasks. The
highest load factor I have managed so far is around 3.5 and that
was dding the Squeeze DVD-1 iso to a USB stick.
Real Life: It was supposed to be thunderstorms with rain and high winds all of today. But we got a few gusts and one roll of thunder in the distance. I made soup. R tidied the books and found some old theatre leaflets.
What after Old Computer Challenge week?: I'll probably put a modern supported Linux back onto this machine as it has a good clear screen (IFS) and a nice keyboard for typing. I think showing that a recent supported Linux distribution with current security will work ok-ish on a Centrino with 1Gb of RAM and a mechanical hard drive is a valid sort of thing to do. I might hunt down a Windows 2000 installer for next year though. Age appropriate.
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Back to Slackware: Squeeze was fun and Gnome 2.30 was
educational, but the latest Firefox version that would run was
Firefox-esr 45 and that meant endless certificate errors and
having to confirm security exceptions. Plus there was no route to
secure email. So I (re)installed Slackware 14.2 ('old stable' in
Slackware terms - still gets occasional security updates). Xfce
4.12 is gtk-2.0 based and light enough to run in 512Mb.
One of the other participants did write that 'Unix is cheating',
by which I think they meant that it is quite possible to
multi-task a desktop environment and applications with a secure
network connection on a slow computer. So not quite a 'challenge'.
Perhaps there are different threads to this:
Real life: It was supposed to rain heavily yesterday with thunder storms and be fairly bright today. Actually happened the other way round. So today was a slow day.
Challenge for next summer: depending on what form the
challenge takes, I might try to produce something like a short
video or podcast using lo-fi recording equipment. Sort of
like a Ken Burns trailer for retro-computing (I like using stills
in videos).