2025-07-07 - Old Computer Challenge - Introduction
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This year i plan to voluntarily participate in the OCC. Two times
now i have done involuntary challenges due to primary hardware
failure. One of the hazards of using hand-me-down hardware. It's
nice to be doing it this year under less challenging conditions.
Old Computer Challenge 2025
A friend sent me a T500 with CoreBoot and SeaBIOS pre-installed. It
has a 64-bit Core2 Duo CPU, 4 GB RAM, and a 320 GB spinning rust
disk. It is difficult for me to wrap my mind around calling these
specs old, but it was released 17 years ago in 2008. That's nearly
six times the duration of the maximum warranty period. It's old,
okay?
This laptop has Linux stickers on the cover, so i chose to use Linux.
I love minimalist systems like OpenBSD and SvarDOS, so i chose to
install Alpine Linux. Several years ago i read Solene's post about
Alpine Linux as a desktop, and i have been meaning to try it.
Alpine As Desktop
Coreboot is fairly low level. It has no boot-time BIOS setup.
Configuration is done at compile time and settings can be viewed
using the `nvramtool` utility.
This laptop has an Atheros AR9285 WIFI interface, which is supported
by the ath9k driver. For some reason the Alpine Linux install media
does not automatically load this driver. Prior to running
`setup-alpine` i needed to run `modproble ath9k`.
This laptop has an Intel i865 GPU. This chipset *was* supported but
then it was dropped from the mesa package. The driver still exists
in the unmaintained mesa-amber package, but Alpine doesn't have that.
I used Mode Setting instead, and did *not* install the
libva-intel-driver and xf86-video-intel drivers.
I stayed pretty close to the wiki install instructions.
Alpine Wiki - Installation
Alpine Wiki - Desktop
Alpine Wiki - Kernel Modesetting
Recently i read about IanJ using the suckless terminal emulator.
I will try `st` from the Alpine package collection.
Suckless Terminal Emulator
The rest of my toolkit includes busybox awk, dosbox-staging, lynx,
oed, tcc, tmux, and xpdf. I used tcc to compile various local
programs including `uncsv` which makes it easy to process CSV data
with any AWK implementation.
To get into the spirit, i dug out my Keytronic E03601QLPS2-C
keyboard and a ball mouse. Clickety Klackety Klack!
tags: occ2025,retrocomputing
Tags
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occ2025
retrocomputing