Paths on the Moon

Old Computer Challenge 2024 - Day 1

First day of the Old Computer Challenge. Not so much to say. Today I didn't really worked with the computer, so I will write about some more things about my setup and so on.

OK, as I wrote in the last post, I'm using a Sony VAIO netbook from around 2010, with a double core Intel Atom N470, 2 whooping GB of RAM, 240GB of storage and a 11" 1024x600 display. It came originally with a 160GB HDD (I think), but I changed it for a SSD because the HDD died. It has 3 USB 2.0 port on one side, and VGA, ethernet and a SD card reader on the other side. Its original OS was Windows 7 Starter, and boy, it lagged like hell 😅.

For the challenge I installed Arch Linux with Openbox. Why this setup? Around 2008 I was growing a little bored with my Debian setup, and after having gone through Ubuntu and Fedora (and experimenting with many other flavors of Linux, even Solaris) I wanted to try one of the distros "for grown people". So I tried Arch and after many trials and errors (and printing tens of pages from the wiki) I managed to install it. I was ecstatic. I used that config until 2011 with minimal issues. That's what I tried to emulate with my current setup for the OCC. Obviously it's not completely accurate since I no longer have that computer. For starters, that machine's CPU was a Pentium 4 @ 3GHz, with 512MB SDRAM and a 80GB HDD. My netbook, which from the moment I entered the challenge I named it MoonHaze, has a 64bit CPU, 4X the RAM and a much faster storage. I could have limited the RAM and the CPU, but I decided to try first using its current config to see what limitations I might encounter.

Of course, I could have gone with a tiling WM like other people. But I'm not too versed with them, and when I tried i3 and Sway in the past, they didn't "click" with me. I suppose that I'm more fond of a "traditional" experience.

Day one, first quirks

Life is slow with this machine. Not desperately slow, but slow nonetheless. OK, my first thing to do was access to my main data, which is stored in MEGA, and to do so I needed to access my password vault, which is in Bitwarden. I expected that the GUI client for Bitwarden would be too heavy for this machine, but it surprisingly ran without too much trouble and without consuming too much RAM. I considered trying the CLI client, but I'll check that later. The next problem is the MEGA client. I suspect that one will be actually more demanding, specially because it needs to run in the background. So I installed the MegaCMD client, but it couldn't sync with my laptop. It gave me an "internal error" without more info. Perfect 🙄. The other problem is that even if I can make it work, I don't want to sync my whole cloud drive. I'll need to ponder my options in this regard. Maybe I could copy some of my files to a Syncthing folder and work from there. I'll see.

Next is the web browser. Firefox is too heavy. Chromium and its principal derivatives, even more so. I tried Falkon, but even if it's lighter, the scroll was slow af. Fortunately there's Min, a light browser based on Chromium, but stripped off the bloat. Sure, it's based on Electron and actually it consumes a little more memory than Falkon, but the scroll is smooth and in general it performs well. I'll see how it behaves during the week. For console, I think I'll stick with links.

Software installed and used until now

Glorious wallpaper!
Glorious wallpaper, of course

MooonHaze fastfetch
Obligatory fastfetch

#fun-things #olcomputerchallenge2024 #oldcomputerchallenge #retrocomputing