Tuesday 13 August 2024


Lisping on an old Acer Aspire One
=================================

During the last edition of the Old Computer Challenge I used an
old Acer Aspire One 522 POVE6 [1]. 

The CPU is an AMD C-60 APU with Radeon HD Graphics which is not
the fastest in the world.

During the challenge this machine ran a Xorg-less FreeBSD 14.1, and I
just worked on the console/virtual terminals. I was quite happy with
it. Running Emacs on a machine without X brings some headaches, while
some often used key-bindings collide with the terminal.

Recently I upgraded this laptop with extra RAM and an SSD [2]. This
creates the possibility to run X11. The ratpoison window manager is a
natural choice for this laptop: I is very light weight and eats zero
screen real-estate. Being a purely keyboard driven window manager
is also a big plus, as the mouse pad on the Acer is not the greatest.

Low performance
---------------
The machine is still not very fast. 

I installed the "normal" Emacs FreeBSD-package, compiled with support
for the X-toolkit. This machine is definitely not up to such a
workload, and I reverted to Emacs-nox.

There is no web browser like Firefox running on it, this is a
deliberate decision, as a counter measure against the
enshittification. Probably the low performance of this machine would
have make it a bad experience anyway.

CCL
---
During the challenge I toyed with CCL, and started a new Common Lisp
project. The idea is to build a replacement for Bepasty.

Bepasty is a wonderful snippet manager and file dropper. In 2021 I
have installed in our local network and right from the start use it
very often. The only problem is, that it can't be used without
JavaScript.

Currently I am building a replacement that uses plain HTML. I build
this on CCL, with Hunchentoot, the Common Lisp web server.
Because the machine runs X11, there are less troubles with the
Emacs keybindings.

This setup has one downside. When uploading files to the Hunchentoot
web server, it reports a "text/plain" MIME-type, whatever the file
being uploaded. It turned out that the browser provides the MIME-type.
This machine runs only the Links, Lynx and the Emacs eww web browsers.
Uploading from a different machine with Firefox results in the right
MIME-type.

Either the TUI-browsers don't provide a MIME-type and Hunchentoot
falls back to the default type of "text/plain", or these browsers
provide that type.

Working on the Acer
-------------------
The Acer Aspire One 522 is slow and the display has a resolution of
just 1280x720.

It excels however in being a lovely little light weight machine. The
10.1 inch display results it a small laptop. This makes it very nice to
use on your lap.

The keyboard is not as good as on my X201, and a bit cramped, but
one gets used to that.

The performance issues don't matter much when developing, only the
initial compilation of the Quicklisp libraries takes more time. When
developing in Common Lisp, one can narrow the compilation to a single
function, while the program worked on keeps running, and the extra
compile time due to the slow processor stays in such cases unnoticed.

All in all, I am glad to have revived this old netbook and have
great fun with it.


[1]: gopher://box.matto.nl/0/prepared-my-machine-for-the-occ-2024-edition.txt
[2]: gopher://box.matto.nl/0/upgrade-of-the-occ-laptop.txt


Last edited: $Date: 2024/08/13 09:14:51 $