One week at 100Mhz: Lessons learned

The week has finally wound down, and I’m calling an end to the 100Mhz experiment. It was an interesting run, and I’m glad I followed it through to the end.

I say that because I was tempted about halfway through to call it quits, mostly for hardware reasons. Maybe it’s my imagination, but that stuttering power switch seems to be more of a problem as the days wear on. And it just plain scares me to watch the power flicker through the entire machine like that. That can’t be good for a 12-year-old computer. Or an 8-year-old wireless card and a two-week-old hard drive.

Overall I learned a lot during this little adventure. And with the notes I kept I think I can make some advances with that machine in the future — if the hardware holds out, of course.

I think the biggest revelation in the entire week was just how light and fast a machine can run, if you forego graphical toolkits completely and rely on terminal applications. Xorg 7.3 itself, for whatever reason, runs amazingly light on that hardware, but shifting to a console-only enviroment makes it unstoppable.

That’s the reason I rebuilt my 550Mhz Celeron today with Awesome 2.3.4 and console applications only — nothing from either of the GTK sets, no fonts save Terminus and no icons. I’m using mplayer for movies, cplay et al. for music and elinks for browsing. It’s quite a bit faster than the Pentium, and that’s only natural, but the difference between this and the previous installation with a graphic environment is also a huge improvement.

Regardless of the software, the system still needs something to act as an intermediary for USB or SD card or CD access. It’s a hard fact that a machine without a CD player just isn’t going to be able to use a CD. So even if I were to use the machine full time, I’d still need something else on the side to pick up the slack created by relying on a machine that predates widespread USB use.

Since I’m discussing hardware, it goes without saying that the best idea for a machine like this is to make sure it’s running at 100 percent, and not have to worry about trivial details, like stuttering power switches.

And since I mentioned it, yes, I do believe I could continue to use the machine full time, for daily tasks. There would always be blind spots on it, but to be honest there wasn’t much I ran across in a week of use that the machine couldn’t at least work around.

Software-wise, I think I made only one small error, and that was to rely on emacs over vim. Nano proved to be a washout, since it wouldn’t do the line-wrapping-without-linefeed trick, but emacs was a monster on a machine with only 16Mb of memory, and there wasn’t a really good reason for keeping it on there. I’ve looked at vimwiki and a few other vim options since then, and I think, if I had it to do over again, vim would be the way to go.

But to be too honest, I am probably just a crackpot. It takes a strange mentality to consider downgrading your entire collection of laptop computers to a single machine that doesn’t even have a CDROM. I doubt there are many people who will agree with the idea, so I will only say that I wouldn’t be uncomfortable shifting to a 100Mhz machine with 16Mb.

On the other hand, I used to own a Compaq Presario 1020 in museum condition, and that one with the same arrangement would have easily erased every other machine from my menagerie. One hundred and twenty megahertz, 48Mb of memory, CDROM, integrated JBL speakers and a 1.08Gb hard drive that I would immediately swap out for something with some speed.

Yup, that was the machine to keep. Only I didn’t, and I kick myself on occasion for getting rid of it. Oh well. Hindsight, etc., etc.

So the moral of the story, with the entire week in the rear view mirror, is that there’s little you can’t do with an old computer like that, so long as you’re willing to take the time to learn it, set it up and get used to it. Make a few allowances here and there, keep an open mind, don’t put too much pressure to perform on yourself or the machine, and yes, you too can live free and easy with a computer you found in the trash.

But hey, if it’s a nice enough machine, it’s anything but trash.

One week at 100Mhz: X-less and not a hiccup

My week at 100Mhz is quickly drawing to a close, and as one of the final tasks I ran the entire system this evening from the console, which is to say without X at all. No Awesome, no rvxt-unicode, no graphical dependencies.

And as you can see (or can’t really, I guess), the net result is the same. I get the same things done on the same hardware, with the only change being that screen is now a major player, allowing me to switch between tasks a little more smoothly than just allocating one tty to each application.

Of course, eliminating the need for a graphical interface, even one as slim and light as the Awesome setup I have available to me, means things run even lighter, if you can believe that. Ordinarily, under X, it takes a minute or so for Charm to start up, and another minute for it to jump to emacs, and there’s a soft lag as emacs does its usual backups and disk access.

I can live with those things — I consider them a necessary evil if I want to have three terminal emulators open and the desktop at 800×600 and so forth and so on. But if I sacrifice those things, I get an immense return on system resources.

Right now I have screen, elinks, htop, Charm (and Python), emacs and calcurse running simultaneously, and the net system draw is no more than 7Mb of 12Mb available, plus 6Mb of swap. And processor stress is spiking at 50 to 60 percent when disk access is occuring. Otherwise, it’s dropping to 10 and 12 percent, and floating there. It’s frightening how little the system needs to stay alive.

But even more frightening is the tradeoff on speed. No swapping whatsoever, except if I add another application to the mix. My typing speed under emacs, which is usually a little groggy, is a feather touch. Overall system responsiveness is a huge improvement over the X-bound system. Even software that spawns other software — like Charm to Python to emacs and back again — is lightning-fast. (For 100Mhz, of course. )

And I have all the same software at my fingertips, nothing lost in the transition from X to tty, and everything still working just as it should.

With one or two small exceptions, which I am obligated to report. Of course I no longer can access feh, and since I stripped all framebuffer support from the kernel and left it to stand with only standard VGA drivers, I don’t really have a way to display images. If I was really serious about running this under the console for any length of time, I could probably solve that issue in a matter of an hour or so.

And I didn’t install gpm since mouse support at the console level wasn’t really on my list of necessities for the week. And certain weaknesses — like sluggish Internet access speeds from certain sites in elinks — weren’t the fault of my machine really, so this didn’t affect them much.

But it’s funny to think that in the catastrophic failure of the graphic system, this machine is still 99 and 44/100 percent useful. Nothing is changed. Everything still works just like it did. Ordinarily if X mysteriously quits, I have an hour or two of troubleshooting to perform before I can go back to whatever nonsense I was pursuing before calamity struck.

More and more I think this might be the path I take in the future, regardless of the machine I use. I’m already committed to remaking the Thinkpad with Awesome. And considering my long-standing fear of the Silicon Motion drivers and my lackluster enthusiasm for Xorg 7.4, the idea of being able to use the greater portion of my computer even if X-Incorporated fail to deliver … well, that’s turning the table completely.

This is all a little embarrassing really. I’ve been pushing terminal apps for years, and I feel like I’m starting all over with them again. Perhaps that’s been the biggest epiphany from my experience at 100Mhz — not that a machine running at 100Mhz is completely and perfectly usable over the long run, but that the software I would pick to use on that machine is probably the software I should be using on a day-to-day basis.

You learn something new every day, but some days you learn the same new thing over again.

This is not Gnome

Every now and again, even I am taken by surprise by a screenshot. It’s not often, but kerry_s‘s work with JWM, tricking it out to give it a Mist-ish Gnome look in grey, did it this time.

You’ll have to sign in to the forums to see the images there, but I don’t think he’d mind if I reproduced them here.

  

Amazing work. It’s a pity the real Gnome doesn’t look as good as that, and run on the same hair’s breadth of memory.

One week at 100Mhz: Paradigm shifts

I’ve noticed a side effect since I started relying on this 100Mhz machine for day-to-day use, and it’s having a trickle-down effect on some of my other, long-standing opinions and projects.

First, I have admitted that I am struck by how much I can get done with a machine running at this slow a speed and with such bottom-of-the-barrel specifications. But the flip side of that is that I am also impressed with how much of the workload is easily and efficiently managed by this array of console applications.

Which makes me look askance at two things: First, the Thinkpad that I ordinarily use for these tasks; and second, Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix.

I’ll explain. This machine has an 800×600 screen. The Thinkpad also has an 800×600 screen, but as a general rule it’s quite crowded. I rely a lot on Alt-Tab switching between Sylpheed, Zim, Osmo and so forth, as well as the music player, file manager and maybe even Leafpad.

And it’s rare that I browse the Internet on that machine. I have chopped down Firefox to managable size or used Kazehakase on it in the past, but the video card is nothing special, and generally speaking it has a hard time keeping up.

On the other hand, this machine can surf the Web with elinks, manage e-mail with alpine, arrange files with mc, post to this blog with Charm … you know what I mean. And you can probably see where I’m going with it.

I’m considering moving that entire system to an Awesome installation using terminal programs, rather than sticking with GTK2-based stuff. And at 550Mhz, it’s a comparative screamer to this one. Just thinking about the relative speed throws me into a reverie. Awesome 2.3.4, plus cplay with the mplayer hack, plus mc, alpine, elinks, calcurse, the Terminus font, transparent urxvt terminals, Charm and an editor. …

And the flip side of that (can you have three flip sides?) is that I am realizing that the GTK1.2 remix of Ubuntu might have been a step toward a dead end.

After all, almost nothing in the way of software on that machine is receiving updates — the bulk is no longer maintained or even developed, because of course, GTK1.2 is so far gone into obsoletia. That’s part of the reason it works, but it also means there’s nothing there that will get better.

(Part of that was by design, by the way. I knew full well that I wouldn’t, for example, have to release updates to that ISO if no software ever received any real attention. I am heartless, am I not? )

On the other hand, the same core system with Awesome, plus the array of console applications I have mentioned, would be a far greater and more powerful system for low, low-end machines. If I can get the same kinds of things done on a true Pentium with only 16Mb of memory, anything bracketed by that ISO would probably perform even better by foregoing an outdated toolkit and relying on a tiled window manager and terminal applications.

And it would give an exceptionally old computer — like this one — the alternative of working strictly from the tty and losing no function at all. A few terminal windows would keep the same system alive and working at the same level (albeit a little … differently) as it would in the graphical mode.

So what’s that all mean? Is there an Ubuntu Awesome-Plus-Console-Apps-Plus-Terminus-Font Remix in the future? I don’t know. I might be taking on another project that I just don’t have the time to properly manage. So if you beat me to it, I won’t be offended.

But yes, I’ll probably give it a try. We’ll see.

Farewell, OLPC XO-1

A few weeks ago, after some soul-searching, I decided to pack up the OLPC and ship it off to a new user elsewhere in the world. I’ve relayed it to a second party in America, who is better equipped to present it to its new owner.

I decided to part ways with it for several reasons. First, I honestly hadn’t used it in well over three months. There’s practically a waiting line for computer use in this household, and tinkering with the XO-1 had fallen way down on the list.

I had lots of plans but have no time to enact them, and so disuse (not misuse) was to blame. I am far more enamored with this 100Mhz machine than I had been with the XO, and in turn more enthused by the idea of working with that hideous old K6-2 than I was with the XO, and doubly so of working with either of the Thinkpads than I was with the XO.

But I don’t kid myself either. I am a laptop fiend, and while the XO was technically a laptop, there were too many parts that deviated from the “normal” range of laptop hardware (if there is such a thing) to fall within my focus. It was, in other words, a little too unusual to pique my interest.

Perhaps more influential in the decision was my rather steep disappointment in the off-again, on-again hardware failures I had with the machine. I had committed myself to overlooking those faults; I even added it to my to-do list for the year. And I never really reported it here, but I was able to “cure” the machine of its sticky-key issue twice by using a common hair dryer to soften the glue under the CTRL key, and massage it back to a functional level. (Thanks again to the OLPC fan who e-mailed me with that “solution” … it’s what convinced me to keep it for another few months, really.)

But the idea that a six-month old computer intended for underprivileged children had a vaguely cripping hardware fault after extremely light use … well, let’s just say it was like a grain of sand in my mouth. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep it out of my mind. It just continued to irritate, with no sign of relief.

I enjoyed the time I had with it; I count my Crux installation and long-running Arch installations as coups in my personal repertoire. I would have been happier with it if, in my experience, the video subsystem better matched the demands put on it (it always seemed a bit too slow for 1200×800, or whatever) and if perhaps there was a little more power overall, in the entire system.

But aside from that there is no coda for the cute little green laptop. It was one part experimentation and one part honest-to-goodness philanthropy that convinced me to buy it and its counterpart. I probably wouldn’t do it again, but I’m willing to admit that was only my experience, and not necessarily the norm.

Now if only I could convince myself to thin out the remaining members of the herd. …

One week at 100Mhz: Scary power failures

The one sad part about working with this machine is that I have discovered one or two mechanical flaws that are worrisome. And this time it’s not just the lack of USB ports.

I mentioned there is one detached key cap — something that could probably be fixed very quickly with a drop of cyanoacrilate — and that there is an occasional line of blue pixels running down the screen. But those are both overlookable … if that’s a word … since neither one really prevents me from using it.

On the other hand, this box has a sketchy power switch. If you remember old machines like this, some of them had two “power buttons” — one a simple power activator, like a push button on an elevator, and another one which was actually a switch that physically cut power to the system. Some old desktops put that switch at the back, and it was usually a rocker switch of some kind.

This has a similar arrangement, with a plastic slider as the “rocker” switch on the back left, and a sort of “restart” kind of button on the front. If I power down the machine and the AC is still attached, I can turn on the system by pressing that activation button. Or I can completely sever the power by switching the plastic switch at the back.

The fault lies somewhere in that rear power switch, which is probably worn with age. Occasionally it doesn’t slide fully to the “on” position, and the current will snap in and out at a frightening rate. It’s like an electric pulse popping through the entire system every half-second. The screen throbs white, the drives cluck and click as their power is applied and then cut immediately. It’s exceptionally scary.

Generally I try to avoid messing with that switch, leaving it in a fully “on” position and using a power strip “surge protector” to cut power when I leave for the day, or when I want to be sure the AC adapter isn’t pulling a current. It seems to be an okay solution.

The same switch might be to blame for another strange phenomenon. Right now the weather is turning from cold to cool, and the humidity is up as the spring rains set in. In the morning, when the machine has been powered down for the night, it’s starting at a very low temperature (I do not have “central heat,” as is common in some other countries) and as it heats up, some of the components flex in their braces.

So usually after about 20 minutes of use, I’ll hear the distinct “pop” of a component shifting as it expands, and the power cycles on the machine. It usually happens after I place my hands on the plamrests, changing the pressure on the frame and allowing the components to slide slightly. And I have a feeling the guilty party is that same switch again, shifting and losing its connection when the temperature reaches a certain point and its board relaxes.

As it gets warmer it shouldn’t be as much of a problem. But it does mean in the here and now, I occasionally walk away from the machine and come back to find it rebooting and doing a file system check.

Neither of these things came into play in the past because the system was never really on for very long. I would boot a kernel, try a configuration, test a piece of software, then shut down. And rarely did I rely on it for so much typing and “hands-on” use.

But neither of these things bodes well for the machine beyond my personal use. It will take a geek of considerable patience to put up with a sketchy power switch, and it will take a geek of even more considerable expertise to consider repairing that. I don’t count myself among the electrically-minded technophiles; if a component stops working, that’s where I draw the line for usability.

Oh, and I am also a kludge with a soldering iron.

But these are the things you discover when you take on a charity case and put it back to work again. Every machine has its quirks, I just wish this one’s weren’t quite so dramatic.

One week at 100Mhz: Slow is as slow does, Mrs. Blue

I’m slowly learning to adapt to my 100Mhz system, and even though there are a few curious points that I’ve had to learn — like the hardware issues I described yesterday — I’m actually quite surprised that I get as much done as I do.

My initial, personal reaction to this little experiment was that I would either go completely crazy waiting to open e-mails, or lose my marbles with nothing to do outside the console. I know, I endorse console applications at every opportunity and practically shove them down the throat of anyone who visits here.

But as far as relying on them for day-to-day use, constantly and without any graphical backups … well, this is a new experience, I must admit. I accept and recommend terminal applications as alternatives or options over GUI-based ones, but as far as forcing myself to live at the console (albeit inside X), I’m taking a dose of my own medicine.

And pushing them at 100Mhz with only 16Mb of memory is a bit extreme — but necessary. I have to prove out loud that these are useful and viable. Walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

So in that sense, not only are the programs themselves presenting a learning curve, but the hardware is confounding things too.

One-hundred megahertz is slow, no matter how you look at it. Things were very different back in 1996, and I have the hardware experiences to prove it. Probably the biggest impediment is just overall web access speeds.

Wikipedia, for example, takes forever to load a page in elinks. It’s not even necessarily loading slowly, but there is some sort of end-of-page flag that elinks is waiting for, and Wikipedia takes forever to send it. So in the mean time, I sit and wait for elinks to surrender control to me again, just so I can read about the Battle of the Somme.

Other web-based stuff is also a drag. Posting pictures on Imageshack is a rather painful process, because the easy click-and-copy-and-paste routine that you and I both know and love … suddenly becomes an exercise in cut buffer wrangling, shift-click-dragging, and timing the right and left button clicks on a two-button ball mouse so that the highlighted text is pasted into place. But only as much as is visible at a time, of course.

elinks also doesn’t seem to have a “Copy link to clipboard” feature like Firefox et al. has. I can highlight a link and then shift-click-drag to highlight the address in the status bar, but there’s no provision to cut-and-paste a link. Which I sorely need for my plog boasts. The ones you see above were actually hand-typed.

On the other hand, GMail in HTML mode in elinks is the food of the gods. My account pages come up quicker in elinks at 100Mhz than it ever does at 1Ghz with Firefox. That I blame on Firefox’s fat butt, which can’t even render strict HTML without pausing for a cookie break.

And alpine makes things a lot quicker too. As an example, I use alpine to access a work e-mail account at home, and I can relay e-mails with prewritten text and signatures much faster with alpine than I ever could with Sylpheed. It’s hard to explain, but alpine’s insert text feature is a huge leap past cutting and pasting in a regular GUI environment.

So slow is relative, in one sense and in another. These console applications are often so much faster than their graphical counterparts that even a machine running at a tenth of the speed can outperform … for my money, that is.

But not everything is wine and roses, of course. I have a few sad points to report, but I’ll save that for later. You’re probably already bored reading this. Sorry, with so few of the distractions of a graphical environment, I find it a little too easy to write.

On the passing of Other OS Talk

I feel the need to shake my head for a few seconds, in note of the passing of the Other OS Talk forum, and its nested subforums on the Ubuntu Forums.

I’m not staff any more, so I don’t feel like I need to restrain my opinions if they differ from those of the administration. It was rare that I didn’t agree with the consensus anyway, but this is one of those times I probably would have spoken out in opposition.

The goal, as I understand it, was to simplify the forum structure a little bit; that I can only surmise given bapoumba’s note here. If that’s the case, I’m all for it.

The ‘forums are the largest Linux support venue on the Internet, and one of the largest English-based Internet forums in existence (so I was told). Even the venerable LinuxQuestions.org, which does a pretty good job encompassing the entire Linux experience, is not as sizable as UF or growing as fast as UF (again, so I was told). And the +/- 30 people who keep it running on a volunteer basis are doing an amazing job.

So the need to streamline is understandable. Still, Other OS Talk was really the first and last place I would stop in for questions or chit-chat. I always thought it admirable that the forums gave Ubuntu users a place to chat about things they wanted to try in other operating systems … or for that matter, gave Windows users a place to ask questions of people they knew and trusted.

But it’s closed now. You can still read the contents of course, but Other OS Talk and all its subarenas are read-only. Cross-distro questions can be asked in the same places where you ask Ubuntu questions, and tagged with the “Other_OS” tag when you ask it.

So in reality, I guess it’s still the same. It doesn’t feel the same as peeking in on the Ubuntu-gone-Arch contingent’s plans to take over the world, or listening to the Debian purists philosophize from their digital mountaintop. I kind of liked that. But it’s done. No need to go on wasting breath.

And now I have to say it: Drop Other OS Talk but keep Community Cafe Games?!

P.S.: It looks like Mike is willing to field a discussion on the issue in the next forum council meeting. I might be willing to attend, but I would feel somewhat guilty, being an off-again-on-again community participant. …

One week at 100Mhz: Hardware hopscotch

After one day, the 100Mhz experiment is standing tall. Which is to say, I’m standing tall even after some minor setbacks and inconveniences.

The most obvious difficulty I’ve had thus far is transferring material off external media — external media that just doesn’t exist to a machine this old.

So for example, if I want to transfer files off my digital camera — the same one I endorsed a looong time ago — I need something that can read an SD card.

That “inconvenience” is nothing new, since I don’t really have a machine that will handle SD cards anyway. I regularly use a Windows system with an SD port at work to move stuff off onto USB, which I can use on most of my other machines, usually.

But without a USB port on this machine, my only one now, I have another wrinkle to unfold. The beat-up Thinkpad has a USB port — only one, and in a rather inconvenient place, I might add — and so I have to move the files on to it, and then move them across the network.

So again, I have to rely on a Windows machine with an SD port to move images to USB, then rely on a Linux machine with a USB port to move them on to a network, then rely on a network connection to move them onto here, where I can transfer them out through alpine or whatever.

Just as an example, that photo from yesterday required two other machines and my in-house network to get it into place, just so I could upload it to the Web.

And the same problem will exist if I need something off CD. It’ll be CD to ancillary machine, ancillary machine to network, network to Pentium. Don’t even talk to me about DVD access.

But that’s a rarity, to be sure. I rely less and less on DVDs these days (or even CDs, really), and more and more on things like USB flash drives or modular hard drives to back up my files and whatnot. (I learned an ugly lesson a few years back, when a collection of files were reduced to vapor because Sony didn’t intend for their DVDs to have a lifespan of more than a year … and neglected to tell me about it. I’m still angry about that one.)

In any case, I don’t think my survival at 100Mhz would be as successful if I didn’t have access to another computer, in order to take on some of the daily roles I expect the slow one to fulfill.

There are some ways around that, of course, but the measure of convenience of a SD-to-PCMCIA adapter or even a PCMCIA USB adapter would probably be thin when compared to the technical conundrums it would present, on a machine this slow and with such a narrow range of function.

And anyway, anything that I could use to expand upon it would probably require the loss of another component. I really doubt this machine can take on a second PCMCIA card, which means the wireless would have to be removed to insert the adapter.

But all that is empty musing. I’m not going to pay US$35 for an adapter that may or may not work with Linux and may or may not work on this hardware, to sidestep the cooler and geekier solution of routing my workload through an assortment of castoff computers. After all, which gets me more points in the techno-karma category: Buying an adapter, or stringing together three other thrown-out machines to do the same job?

Yeah, that’s what I thought too.

One week at 100Mhz: I found a desk

Underneath all those computers, there was a desk hiding.

And that’s the way things look now, and how I plan for them to look in the week to come. That’s the bet — one week at 100Mhz, with nothing graphical, nothing post-1996 technologywise (unless you count the wireless card, which is considered primitive by just about everyone but me). Let the games begin.

The Inspiron is in the closet, along with the Thinkpad, the Sotec and even the OLPC. What you see there is what I’ve got. No USB. No SD card access. No CDROM. One hundred megahertz of pure enjoyment, with nothing to interfere with the important things of a desktop experience.

Of course, there are a few stipulations, which I will mention up front so you don’t think I’m cheating if they come into play later.

First, of course, you can’t be sure if I’ve already dragged out the other machines and put them back in a line, like they usually are (the family usually calls this desk “command central”). So you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I mentioned that the Inspiron is in the closet and that’s true, but I’ve been using that since the start as a surrogate whenever software needs to be built for this machine. I’m not so much a fool as to try and build software on a Pentium Classic.

In fact, I am doing almost nothing in the way of system maintenance at this point. I made the mistake of trying to use localedef earlier tonight because I realized I forgot to set my locales when I built this system. But after 10 minutes, I decided I could live without them for a little while longer.

Furthermore, this system still doesn’t have sound, and I don’t think I’ll be adding it any time soon. Sound is another little quirk that takes time to solve, and in the end, I usually have a second machine playing music or movies anyway. So if the Thinkpad comes back out so I can watch one of my DVD rips or play a little ogg goodness, that’s normal. Otherwise, that’s a radio in the background in the picture.

You do remember what a radio is, don’t you?

The beat-up Thinkpad is still running as an rtorrent/fttps client and ports host for the rest of the house. True, nothing else is running that would need those ports or torrent access, but it’s there because it’s always there.

And the Sotec machine is in the closet, where it will probably be for a few more days until I get around to testing proc’s i586 repository for Arch. I’ve been wanting to do that for weeks now, but I’ve been so overloaded with other stuff that … you know.

Lastly, this machine is networked into the battered Thinkpad as a matter of course. So transferring files or backing up configurations is done by moving them across the wireless and onto the torrent client. From there, they can be transferred wherever. If ever.

Tomorrow I’ll try to give an honest appraisal of how things go with this machine. I imagine before the week is over I’ll have a lot of things that need discussed, both good and bad. …