jmcunx OCC 5
Old Computer Challenge # 5 (OCC5) Notes, which is called "there is no challenge".
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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$Id: occ_5.gmi,v 1.12 2025/11/24 21:10:13 jmccue Exp $