For now, 2.6 is fine

It’s been about a month since the release of Crux 2.7, and technically I still have two machines I haven’t upgraded.

Or maybe I should say one and a half. Half because the Mebius is usually bouncing between operating systems, off in la-la land, testing a wild and bizarre distro du jour.

So yes, I do have a backup Crux 2.6 system written as an image file, and when I want that system to work as I like it, I write it back and do what I need to do.

But it’s already out of date, since back releases of Crux don’t get much in the way of updates. And that means the machine I rely on most is dreadfully stagnant.

But let’s be honest for a second: A meager 80Mb of memory, a lowly 100Mbit PCMCIA network card and probably three or four gigabytes of open space. Nothing critical there, that’s for sure.

And all of the hardware is so old, it hasn’t seen attention in the kernel for years. Honestly, I don’t feel like a target demographic.

Furthermore, if it’s not broke, why fix it? Short of system underpinnings and maybe an odd utility or two, there’s not much I have in the way of installed software that will get updated very often.

On top of that, building a new system would be a little bit of a pain … and maybe this is why I am really so hesitant.

Back when I had the Celeron in the house it was the surrogate for the CF card while I installed Crux. Running the CF card to the adapter to a USB enclosure didn’t work. I don’t know why.

But it means that I would have to replace the CF card in the Mebius, build the new system in an emulator, boot the Mebius to a live environment (thanks, Slitaz Base), write out the system across USB, reverse the drive arrangement again, and then troubleshoot.

Once more, for emphasis: And then troubleshoot.

That might be just a little more intermediary steps than I like. If I can commandeer another, faster mid-grade IDE-driven machine, I might go for it, but for now, 2.6 is just fine.

I think. …

VICE 2.2 on Ubuntu 10.10

This is embarrassing because I’m a full month behind the times on this one. But I managed to scrape together an hour or two today, and test VICE 2.2 on Ubuntu 10.10.

And of course, the ancient how-to works fine.

The creepy error that was happening in 10.04 is still around, but luckily the fix is still very easy. Building the GnomeUI version (which is really just a GTK2 version) went cleanly.

One last thing: If checkinstall gives problems, stick with sudo make install. It works fine.

Some PKGBUILDs for ConnochaetOS

I promised I would make available the PKGBUILDs I’ve been using for ConnochaetOS, and so … here they are.

I have binary packages for those applications and dependencies, but to be honest, you could probably build them in less time than it takes to download them. Particularly if your machine has any muscle to it at all.

Remy, of the restored 286 fame, graciously offered me some Web space to host stuff like this, and I’ll see if I can get something like a “repository” working. That might also be useful for Crux ports, which I have plenty of.

It may be that some of those things are adopted into ConnochaetOS proper, but if they are or if they’re not, be aware that I probably won’t update these.

So if you stumble on this page a month from now and something is already obsolete … well, you get what you pay for.

Edit: Just for safekeeping, I put the binaries, source code and patches for these here. I know, Mediafire is not glamorous. …

Three more attempts: GRML, MiniNo, Tiny Core

A quick apology of course, for a lack of entries in the past days. My moving date is creeping up on me fast, and looking around I still see I have mounds of junk to sort. The horror, the horror. …

When I have enough time I still take the hour or so it requires to playtest a new distro on that very old Mebius which has been so accommodating over the past six months. I don’t know the total, but I am certain it has been home to something in the double-digits, for number of installs.

And I should be clear that my goal in this is not to beat down modern distros for failing to keep in step with 14-year-old equipment, and nor is it my hope that someone will invent a distro that will target them specifically.

But I do find it interesting, and educational, and somewhat revealing, to see how a current operating system holds up with out-of-date hardware. Extreme as this one may be. …

This time I have three short ones to mention, with varying degrees of success.

GALPon MiniNo seemed to run aground in the same ways as Slitaz or AntiX did: sluggish performance, dallying rollover effects and very lengthy start times.

On the other hand, it’s quite an attractive desktop, and the choice of software is very promising. I found two or three new programs here that I hadn’t known about before. (Of course, there’s a lot I don’t know.)

I want to use this on my fastest machine just for a proper chance to investigate, and because I find it amusing. That might have to wait a few weeks though.

For a lightweight desktop, this is clean and quick and attractive. At extremely low specifications though, it might not hold up so well. Your machine will be the judge.

I liked GRML a lot, and so long as I stuck to the “small” version, I had a system that didn’t demand nearly 3Gb in disk space — keeping in mind that that includes a lot of window managers, X components, etc.

The sad part of the story is that GRML — even the small version — couldn’t boot on only 32Mb of memory. I got the same error messages I saw with Ubuntu and Linux Mint Fluxbox and some other systems built on newer Debian cores.

Thirty-two megabytes just isn’t enough, and that’s the fact (if I am interpreting the error messages correctly, of course ). The newest Debian systems might install in text mode with that much, but I have yet to see one boot.

I hold no grudge of course. These little experiments are wacky, and I don’t always expect grand results. GRML is something I might investigate further, just because it’s unique. (P.S.: I loved the installer. Every distro should use that.)

I’m still fighting with Tiny Core, although I mean “fighting” in a good way. I want very much for this one to work, but the most recent ISOs, when properly burnt to CD, wouldn’t boot.

And using an early 2.x-ish version was a little less than successful, being left at a boot prompt with not much more than a blinking cursor. (Yes, the same as if I used Microcore.)

Video is really where I fall flat though. That CLI fallback is happening (I suspect) because the default boot sequence sends everything to a VESA-based graphics system, and this machine is more or less incapable in that department.

On top of that, I have my doubts about network connections, since I rely mostly on PCMCIA wireless with this laptop, and that might require a little more effort (or acrobatics) on my part, to install without Tiny Core’s handy dandy application browser.

All that aside I’ve tried a couple of boots and update attempts, and I’ve also installed a few systems directly, but with more or less all the same results. Just blink, blink, blink. …

My next plan of attack (and probably what should have been my first plan of attack) is to put together a system in an emulator that has all the necessary pieces (wireless-tools, Xorg and drivers, etc.) and write it across USB.

Not elegant, but nothing about these old machines is very elegant. Usually.