Howto: Find an old computer

I get my junk at the junk shop. That would make sense. And in Japan, I’m lucky to a small degree that there seems to be a strong push toward new things, and not so much toward used things.

So recycle shops and secondhand stores are a fairly strong business here, even if they don’t enjoy much popularity among the Japanese people I know. More for me, I say.

If you need to get an old machine, either for testing or for a friend or out of some perverse sense of ideology , I can tell you a few sources that have worked for me. And a few that I hear work for others.

Friends, Romans, countrymen. Oftentimes people have old machines stashed in attics or sheds, and they just never talk about it. Or maybe atop a garbage pile or in a box of leftover toys.

Remember, your average everyday uneducated computer user thinks about technology in the same way as tires or light bulbs: After a while they get slow or stop working, and after that they’re thrown away.

Knowing that, ask people you usually think of as technologically naive — and I don’t mean that in a rude way. Mechanics know that people who are uninitiated about cars are good sources of fairly recent automobiles that don’t require much work. You’re just doing the same thing.

But always be fair. If the machine is actually worth money, tell them that. Don’t be so much a predator that you can’t help out someone who doesn’t know better. Universal law rewards taking the chance to educate a person, instead of taking advantage of their ignorance.

Thrift sales and charity stores. Similarly, I remember it being a custom in the U.S. to have a garage sale, or a yard sale, in the summer. Flea markets are possibilities too. Community sales or block sales are good too.

The idea extends to recycling shops (thrift shops?) too, where occasionally a working computer is donated or sold off. I can remember a long time ago the thrift shops were chock full of leftover computer junk.

eBay changed that, even if eBay itself has changed as well. Ten years ago people started to realize that the market for those things (and a lot of other old junk) was online, and things could be bought and then resold at a massive profit.

So thrift shops get scoured rather often. In my experience, unless a shop is dedicated to one particular kind of recycling (like the computer resellers in my neighborhood), it tends to be a catch-as-catch-can affair.

Recycling yards. This time I’m talking about industrial-grade scrap yards, or recycling depots. That might horrify you, and I don’t blame you if it does.

But occasionally businesses or governments who are under contract to buy new computers on a regular basis dump machines en masse on recycling yards or scrap yards. Occasionally it’s illegal (or at least environmentally unethical), but when has that ever stopped anyone?

I used to live in a town with a giant recycling yard along side a rail depot, and complete systems were lifted via hook and magnet, compressed into big bricks and loaded on to box cars. Where they went from there, I have no idea. Probably China.

But in the short span between when the local government dumped them, and when they were loaded on a train, I scalped a huge mess of parts and even full systems.

In those days it was around US$3 to take home a complete computer, specs irrelevant. If you brought them a couple of bags of aluminum cans, they called it a fair trade. Those were the days. …

Office tech staff. This is a long shot, because walking into an office of purebred geeks and asking if they have any leftovers for you is like walking into the lion cage at the zoo and asking for a spare steak.

I’ve been mocked more than once asking for a small castoff, even just a floppy disk or an AC cable. So be warned that you might have to suffer a bit. Don’t try it if you can’t bear to lose face.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get handed a machine or two — sometimes as a joke — by inquiring politely and performing the required obeisances … and approaching from a north-south axis, keeping my eyes averted, and using the third-person honorific when speaking to the staff.

eBay and craigslist. I guess I kind of mentioned one of those already, and the other, to be honest, I’ve never used. Online sources are always a possibility.

And the one thing I like about auction sites (to speak in a little more general term than just eBay) is that you generally are getting fair market value for the item.

That’s an over-generalization, but in my experience, true. The going price for a laptop computer, in the condition specified, is generally adhered to. Not by design, but by nature: Nobody’s going to vastly overpay what a machine is worth.

My impression of craigslist, as built from reports of people and family members who have used it, is that it works a lot like a newspaper classified ad.

So in that sense you might have to make an effort to barter. I’ve seen ads for 10-year-old computers on craigslist that were hideously overpriced, and it was either the ignorance or the greed of the seller that put the price there.

In other words, make sure you know the value of a computer, before you agree to a price in that situation. Generally speaking, a Celeron laptop isn’t worth $125, folks.

Government resales. PublicSurplus.com is something you might look into, although it might be overkill for your needs. Local and regional governments in the U.S. use that site as a clearing house for materiel.

Prices will be good, but transportation is an issue, and you might be buying things by the pallet. If you need something in bulk, this is a good place to start. If not, it might only be handy for a while.

Also check to see if your local or provincial government has a remarketing office, and if they hold regular sales. I used to live in a state capital in the U.S., and there was a once-a-month sale on recovered autos, office equipment and computers.

Free Geek. I’ll give a tip of the hat to Free Geek, even if I haven’t used them personally. As I understand it they operate in different places around the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere?), and will give you a computer if you volunteer for a while.

That, to me, sounds like the best option. Do something good for the people around you, and pick up a rockstar Pentium 4 as a thank-you. If was around a Free Geek store, I’d probably be there all the time.

To finish, I would suggest looking around you carefully, if you’re seeking a machine that — perhaps — doesn’t stand up as tall as the computer you have now.

Knowing that you can do more with less, or at least shift a little closer to enlightenment with a simpler machine, might only require a quick question of the person in the cubicle next to you.

Another winner: ConnochaetOS at 150Mhz, 32Mb

I know, I’ve said this before but … I think I’m in love.

Just about the only downside to working with a source-based distro on a machine as old as … well, as old as the last century, is the fact that almost everything requires a large amount of time, a large amount of discipline and a meticulous attention to detail.

I’m not trying to flatter myself, I’m actually grieving over the effort in putting Crux — as I like it — on a 586 machine when ConnochaetOS does such a great job with almost no effort at all.

And honestly, as someone who migrated from Ubuntu to Arch to Crux, this is my ideal answer to the issue of running a lightweight system on a terrifically out-of-date machine.

I’ve wanted Arch to run on sub-Pentium IIs for years now, and I rejoice everyone puts together a i586 branch. Lowarch led the pack a while back, followed by a few independent efforts, and most recently the dearly departed archlinux-i586.org.

So yes, this may be just the latest in a long string of attempts to keep an i586-based version of Arch moving. And yes, this may be just the latest in my long string of excited attempts to keep my i586 machine moving with Arch.

But this comes off the slow dissipation of the DeLi Linux project, and might be able to carry momentum for a while. There are a lot of factors at work though.

Regardless, it’s still very exciting to watch a 150Mhz machine come to life and dash through the Arch startup sequence. The thrill of that might always outlast an Arch-for-i586 project.

I should mention a few caveats.

First, as best I can tell ConnochaetOS is still in its early stages. The package list is very sparse. Installing from the ISO is going to give you Fluxbox and a few options, and not much more. No vim. No emacs. Only nano.

So if you’re looking for the entire Arch Linux suite plus AUR …well, it’s not quite ready yet. Of course, with Arch, you’re only a few moments away from building whatever package you want, and stepping slowly through dependencies that way.

(Note that you’ll have to download the Arch PKGBUILD and install files from the Arch website, then edit the PKGBUILD to allow the i586 architecture to build. And even then it might need some tightening up.)

Next, I should mention that I installed to a virtual machine and copied across USB with dd, as is the case for most of the distros I test these days. I have a feeling that the ConnochaetOS ISO would boot alright, but I saw no reason to tempt fate. It’s just as easy the other way, and probably faster.

Finally, performance is very nearly what I get from Crux, with a few small concessions. I carve up rc.conf and inittab as a matter of course, and as you can see, I went through the work of building Musca and dmenu-xft, just because.

Occasionally though, I get some rough spots where ConnochaetOS seems to be dragging through something. I am accustomed to using my Crux build of Musca so I have a feel for its relative speed, and at times ConnochaetOS seems to be thinking very, very hard about something very, very important.

Of course that wouldn’t be any different from any other machine that I’ve seen run both Crux and Arch though: Crux is a good step faster than Arch for me, and probably because so much of it is whittled down to nothing.

So I don’t fault ConnochaetOS for inheriting the (infinitesimally minor) shortcoming of its progenitor. Because on the whole, this is really great stuff.

It found my network card, configured it and connected to my wireless network without prodding — and without wireless-tools (which is possible with an orinoco-cs-driven card. Believe it or not).

It managed to make the transition between the emulator and the actual system without losing track of the hard drive, although I did hope for that when I picked the /dev/kernel drive assignment option at installation.

Video-wise, I did have to build my own xorg.conf file and adjust it to avoid the fbdev and trident drivers, and go with vesa. And I need to check to see if this will handle the tridentfb module, like archlinux-i586.org could.

In the sound department … I’m going to take my time, mostly because alsa-lib is in the repos, but alsa-utils isn’t. And there are a few other things I’d like to be in place before I force it to sing.

What I’ve personally built I’ll put out there on the Internet somewhere, and if you want to use it to get your own system up and running, be my guest. And I see that the ConnochaetOS team is soliciting software suggestions, within criteria.

In the mean time, I’m interested in playing with this a little more, and maybe even merging this with the carcass of archlinux-i586.org, which might have a few useful packages that ConnochaetOS, at this point, doesn’t.

Sound crazy? It might. All in the name of science, of course.

More reasons to learn from old computers

I’m still a bit wired over the post from a day or two ago, insisting that a 1.7Ghz machine with a healthy amount of RAM and a decent-sized hard drive would be a detriment to anyone learning Linux.

More and more that strikes me as completely counterintuitive, and for plenty of reasons. I already explained that an older machine is a challenge, whereas a newer machine is a luxury.

But honestly, when someone wants to learn Linux, or at least try it out, I don’t recommend they go buy a new computer. I suggest they find a 4- or 5-year-old laptop, and learn the ropes that way.

And aside from three reasons to buy old machines instead of new ones — power demands, noise levels and Linux compatibility — there are other good reasons to use an old computer to learn about penguins.

1. Cheaper. That’s probably the most obvious one. Suggesting someone needs a high-end machine to learn Linux suggests they need a new computer to use Linux, and that’s implying money. I wouldn’t endorse that under any circumstances. Save your money and use an old machine for your education.
2. More impressive. Geeks love to see computers burst to life in a blaze of glory. No one will be impressed if you install Linux on a flashy new octuple-core super-personal-computer with 12Gb of memory and a terabyte hard drive. Do the same thing on a 12-year-old Pentium and geeks get interested. Heck, pull that off and you can even start your own blog.
3. Expendable. If you forget to compile fan support into your kernel, and you end up melting your 333Mhz Pentium II processor into a puddle of goo, you might be sad for about 15 minutes, and then you’ll find a replacement on eBay for US$12. Do the same thing with a 6-month-old quad-core, and you’ll be crying in your tasty beverage. (Oh, and do that with your 66Mhz 486DX laptop though, and you might be crying in your tasty beverage too. … Wait, did 486s even have processor fans? )
4. Compatibility, compatibility, compatibility. Why run the risk of having to wait six or eight months for software support to catch up with a new computer, when you can get started immediately with a leftover 750Mhz Thinkpad? Support for older machines has been honed and refined over the past decade, and then at least you have the relative assurance that if something goes wrong, it’s probably not the software.
5. Historical lessons. This is a bit oddball, but if you work with older machines for long enough, you start to understand the hardware evolution as well. I knew zilch about the switch from straight PCMCIA to CardBus until I ran aground with a 100Mhz laptop. I knew zip-zero-nada about ISA sound cards until I finally got one working with Debian. Spend some time with an old computer and you see how the arc of technological history traveled. …
6. Power suckers. You can argue this point with me if you like, but I will stand on any sinking ship so long as I can continue to insist that a 14-year-old laptop has a lower power draw than your octuple-core behemoth. You won’t convince me otherwise. Sorry.
7. Cheaper (to upgrade). What’s it take to max out the memory in a Celeron laptop? Uh-huh. And what’s it cost to buy a comparable amount of memory for your quad-core laptop? Uh-huh. So long as you’re spending money on your education, you might as well save some for pizza. Feed your brain and your face, on less of your precious cash.
8. Enlightenment. This is an off-kilter one, but there’s something to be said for finding your way out of technological imprisonment and trimming your life requirements down to a smaller, older, and less powerful machine. If you can rely more and more on that old computer to teach you Linux, you might learn a few things about maximalism in life, too.

No, no. More and more it’s just obvious to me that you really should learn the ropes with a leftover, secondhand machine with mid-grade specs at best. Going over the top, hardware-wise, just to learn a new operating system strikes me as ill-conceived. Not that my opinion matters, though.

An extremely minor update

Time is extremely short today, so I must ask your forgiveness for an equally short post.

I’ve been keeping a day-to-day chronicle of my adventures here for almost five years now. Don’t applaud; it’s nothing to be proud of. Blogging itself is a vacuous and insipid pastime, and I resent it wholeheartedly.

Regardless, some people pointed out that my About page is a little out-of-date, and didn’t really reflect what this site has evolved into.

And they were right, and so I adjusted it slightly. It’s still a very quick rundown on what happens here, with old hardware being the focus, and with the obligatory GFDL statement as well.

And since I still — years after starting out — get comments asking what the title means … that information is now right up front.

Old hardware a handicap? Au contraire!

I spat out my metaphorical coffee this morning, when I read this line, in regard to a 1.7Ghz Athlon with 256Mb and a 60Gb hard drive.

A machine that underpowered (mainly the ram size) will be a serious handicap when learning Linux. … All your choices will be driven by the limited ram. Even so, your time will be wasted waiting for even the lightweight applications you chose to do simple things.

Whoa, waitaminute. A 1.7Ghz machine with a healthy 256Mb will be a handicap to learning Linux? A handicap? Even when armed with lightweight applications?

I have to disagree, but before I do that, I have to ask a small question: What is meant by “learning Linux?”

Because if “learning Linux” is navigating through the latest rendition of Gnome, with spinning desktops and fancy eye doodads and a quadraphonic Blaupunkt, then yeah, sure, I almost agree.

Of course, that doesn’t take into account that all the way up to Ubuntu 8.10, I was playtesting Gnome desktops on a 1Ghz machine with a measly 512Mb in it. A 1.7Ghz machine with half of that would still have been at least usable … until 10.04, anyway.

But if you’re talking about learning Linux — I mean really getting down and dirty with it, and not just trying to figure out which Compiz plugin is your favorite — then my money says there’s no better solution than something hopelessly underpowered.

Why? Simply because a low-power, underachiever machine is unforgiving. It is restrained by hardware and time and you will know immediately if you’ve done something wrong on a machine with no real muscle to it.

Make a mistake on a dual-core machine, and yes, you’ll know about it. Leave off a kernel boot flag or misconfigure /etc/inittab, and yes, things will become frazzled.

But you don’t make the same mistake twice on a low-end machine because it’s considerably painful when you do. You learn your lessons the first time, when you scramble your filesystem or misconfigure Grub. Because recovering takes longer and you have time to consider the weight of your actions.

Of course, you’re free to approach the beast from any direction, and if you want to tackle a new operating system with a machine that requires its own zip code and power substation, you are free to do so.

But I can also say that I learned a lot more about Linux from a wildly unpredictable 100Mhz machine, and even more from a rancid little K6-2, than I ever did from a dual core Thinkpad. I enjoy having it, but I don’t count it among my educational treasures.

Old machine a handicap? Quite the opposite, thank you.

Keep the customers satisfied: Three more graphical apps

The post a week ago mentioning a few non-console programs was well received, so here are a few more I made a note of, but probably wouldn’t pursue personally.

vim users, or at least people who prefer vim’s approach to navigation, will probably like apvlv.

As far as PDF viewers go, it’s delightfully quick and to-the-point. Take a good look at that interface though, because if you’re not already adept at vim, you’ll be a bit stuck for getting started.

But otherwise, command mode and :help do what you would expect, and joy of joys, even things like :tabnew are supported.

Part of me says if you’re a vim fan anyway you probably already have your fingers dipped in another PDF viewer solution. But you can’t go wrong giving this one a try.

Here’s aqualung, which I found … I don’t remember where.

It’s quick and speedy, and unorthodox for a music player. In its AUR version it calls on quite a few dependencies though, and more than one has to be built from another AUR package.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me wonder, in the grand scheme of things, if I really need it as a music player when things like Potamus are running quite a bit lighter.

I also must admit (again) my prejudice against applications that try to track and manage music for me. I don’t like it, and I might as well just say it out loud.

On the other hand, this has a nice interface that focuses more on controls and information than sparkle and motion. It’s a no-nonsense application, which I do like.

Altogether, music players are my Achilles heel, and no matter which one I like or try, there’s always another one out there that seems lighter or does more. Shake a tree, and a music player for Linux will fall out. Egad.

One more, just because three feels natural. Here’s gcstar, which can help you manage your collections.

When I say “collections,” I mean “collections.” Of just about any sort, flavor shape or function. Music collections, stamp collections, video game collections — you name it, this’ll probably handle it for you.

And one of the nice things, as you can see in the screenshot, is that it comes prepared to access online information about, for example, music or other domains, and update your local collection to match.

I can remember keeping stacks of 5 1/4-inch floppy discs organized manually with a C-64 decades ago. I would have given a limb or two for some way to automatically fill categories and minute information.

But that was then, and this is now. The new world expects online databases to feed your local ones, and if it didn’t, it would be a shortcoming. So the nostalgia moment ends now.

I should note that installing this in Arch brought in just about every Perl package that exists; if that’s important to you, consider yourself warned. I don’t think this would be too far beyond the muscle in, for example, a Pentium II machine, but it’s always possible.

That’s good for now. If you see something here that looks appealing, give it a try.

Back to Debian, at 133Mhz and 32Mb

By most accounts I am a fairly patient person. I do, however, occasionally get tired of repeating the same tasks, troubleshooting the same problems and performing the same acrobatics.

So after a second and third try at putting Crux 2.7 on the Pentium, and getting a perfect system … except this time for a lack of any network — I decided to go the short route.

I’ll admit that my first stop after Crux was to try the same stunt with Slitaz, console-only. And it worked well except for some reason, it too was having network problems.

I am willing to blame my router at this point, but just for a final troubleshooting effort, I used the Debian netboot CD and got a fully working system this morning.

I even went one step further and got my mysterious RT61-based PCMCIA card to link up nicely, with the firmware-ralink package out of Lenny-non-free installed.

The only other issue I have with using Debian on a Pentium, as a torrent slave and file host, is that rtorrent in Lenny is stuck at version 0.7.9 or something.

That’s pretty far back. I don’t think that even supports DHT. No matter, a quick surf and I came across this page which described a fairly simple way to bump rtorrent up to 0.8.6.

And with that and mc and htop and screen, along with the required nfs-kernel-server and dropbear packages (openssh-server seems to imply X11 stuff, which I would prefer avoid), the machine is more or less complete.

It’s not a picture-perfect replica of the machine I usually configure, and it takes a little longer to boot, but it sure took a lot less time to wrangle. Sometimes that’s a bonus.

An impending move

I first should apologize for the scarcity of posts over the last week or so. There is a reason for that; unfortunately it’s pinned to some real-life changes that have an impact on the topics of this blog.

I am anticipating a move in the next month or so. After three years at the same job and in the same house, I have about a month before most everything is uprooted and I shift to a new location.

I won’t give too many details, but I can say that I will still be in Japan. I enjoy the culture and people — particularly when compared to my native culture — and so I plan to stay a while longer.

It does mean there is a possible gap in “service” in the coming weeks though. I anticipate, for the mean time, to continue daily updates, but if there is a break, you’ll know why.

The other implication though, is to make me wonder if I shouldn’t prune my collection of antiques a little, and lighten my load before I move.

There are some obvious things that need dispersal — I have about three times as many network cards as computers, for example. And one or two of my machines don’t even need external network cards.

And there is the traditional and unavoidable collection of junk that comes with the hobby. Wire wraps. Empty boxes. Stacks of burned but unused ISOs.

I am sifting through the stuff nowadays, and the excess will make its way to the recycle shop. Which is where a lot of it came from.

The irony lies in knowing that, in my new location, there will probably be a similar shop, with similar junk, and I’ll no doubt bring home the same stuff again.

An SSH management script

Since I’m on the subject of text-only systems … if you remember Remy, of the restored 286 fame, you might be interested in his SSHdialog script.

If you manage a lot of ssh connections, I can see where this would be useful. I’ll borrow his screenshot since I only have one connection and so it doesn’t look very impressive.

You probably get the point just by looking at that though. You’ll have to set up a hosts file with your available connections and the addresses for each.

After that, dialog takes over and you can skim and select from the list. Direct, clean and straightforward. Once again, it seems the simple solution might be the best.

Howto: Switch to a console lifestyle

A few months ago scannerdarkly suggested a kind of migration guide for the console, for people thinking of shifting from a graphical environment to a text-based one. To paraphrase, something that would hold their hand as they moved from X to the command line.

Since then I’ve been keeping odd notes on points that would need attention, if there was a shift to be made.

But what I discovered is that there are plenty of suggestions for mundane issues, such as the software to use and the hardware that works. On the other hand, suggestions on the “how” and “why” are a little more scarce.

This whole site is a giant list of software ideas and hardware tweaks with a generalized focus on console-only living. So I’ve intentionally omitted those.

Instead, I have a list of points that you might think about, to make the mental and personal shift from the point-and-click to the type-and-enter. Take them for what they’re worth.

Start small. I think the best way to get the ball rolling is to find yourself a scapegoat. Pick one small task that you rely on in your daily routine — something like checking e-mail or keeping a list of things to do. Downloading torrents is a great place to start. Or maybe a music player.

Then refine the candidates list by focusing on applications that are grotesquely overweight. To use the torrent example, if you’re still using Vuze or Azureus or whatever it calls itself these days, it’s perfect. Or iTunes, as another example. Or … whatever.

I wouldn’t recommend starting with something overarching or wide-sweeping, like an entire desktop or full-feature browsing. Save those for later.

Once you have a guinea pig, remove it. Wipe its configuration files. Terminate it, with extreme prejudice.

Then find a console-driven alternative. Shop around, find something you like, and install it. Then spend a week with it. I lived at 100Mhz for a week almost two years ago (has it been that long?) and I was amazed at what I could get done.

Do your best for a week and learn the ins and outs of the program. Find all the little undocumented controls, all the front-ends and patches, try them all out and see what it can do.

If you find you can’t live without that first, overweight program … well, so be it. This isn’t for everyone. And I’ll be honest, I keep a higher-powered machine off to the side, mostly because I learned the hard way that it’s worthwhile to have one.

But after a week, if things work in your favor, you’ll probably find you don’t need that old, overweight program as much as you thought you would. The software you thought irreplaceable has just been … replaced.

Let things fester. Great, now that you’ve dumped one application in favor of a console alternative, you can start plucking away at others, right?

You can if you want, but I wouldn’t suggest it. Just because one tiny facet of your daily life is now run by the console, that doesn’t mean the entire pie is somehow appealing.

The point of this experiment is to understand how ultra-lightweight software can be just as usable as the heavyweight. Part of that is recognizing, respecting and relishing small programs that do as much as the large ones, but with less requirements.

If you take your time and let that sink in, you start to gain respect for console driven applications. Then other tasks seem to be obvious candidates for text-only equivalents. More than an arbitrary purge, this is a harsh critical eye.

And that’s when you really start to take aim at applications up and down the list, and push them out one at a time. Task managers. To-do lists. Contact managers. E-mail clients. File managers.

Before you know it you’ll be stripped down to a fistful of text-based programs and maybe one large-scale, obese application (my money says it will be Firefox). You’re almost free.

Get serious. The next step is what separates the men from the boys: Dump your window manager. If you’re living with a crop of terminal applications, you don’t need that full-scale desktop environment any more.

Pick a window manager that inches you closer to text-only. For example, you could take up Awesome or xmonad or even dwm, and still manage to use that one graphical program that keeps you hooked to X.

For a little while anyway. After a while you’ll start to wonder if the graphical program is really worth the weight it incurs, and as a result, you can probably avoid it with lighter alternatives. Move from Firefox to Kazehakase to uzbl to elinks. Move from OpenOffice to Abiword to Siag to emacs.

A lot of people stop at this point. It’s enough to prune down the essentials, and rely on terminal programs for 90 percent of what they do. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I endorse it wholeheartedly; you get the best of both worlds.

True enlightenment. But at least try the last step. When you’ve stopped using that last graphical program, then you have truly freed yourself, and you can move away from X altogether. Your systems will become so light and fast that you’ll wonder where exactly all the power came from.

Skipping out altogether on X is dropping hundreds of megabytes of space from your hard drive, and dozens of megabytes of memory from your system demands. It’s like moving from a yacht to a surfboard. Things are faster, cleaner and more exciting.

And that’s when you’ve moved so close to technological zen that you realize the US$1200 computer you bought a year ago is a waste of your time and money.

That’s when you can sell it all off for a few hundred bucks, pick up a leftover Celeron from a garbage pile, restore it, and use it in the same way, with the same software, and do far far more with far far less.

Be honest. So is this the best way to use a computer? I don’t know. I don’t know you. You and I are relative strangers.

I can pitch it to you any way I like: I can tell you all the cool kids use the terminal, I can tell you all the fast software relies only on ncurses and a sparse kernel, I can tell you life is so much cleaner and prettier and quicker when you’re running a console-only environment on half of a lowly 32Mb.

Fact is though, either you want to do it or you don’t. I can’t make it any more appealing to you than it is naturally. Some people love it; I do, for certain.

On the other hand, I’ve been harassed (never seriously) and called “DOS geek,” even if that is so far off the mark, it’s laughable.

My last advice is: Don’t try this on a whim. Try it because you want it to work. Do it because you think it might fit you, or because you need a drastic change.

Or because you’re anticipating a severe reversal of fortune, and you want to downshift your entire life. Or because you’re liquidating. Or because you have adopted an austere lifestyle. Or you really want to be a minimalist.

The best motivation for any change in life — be it computer-related or otherwise — is from within: a natural, innate, sincere desire to change. Try it on a fluke, and it will fail. Try it because you honestly want to, and you will succeed.