Friday 12 July 2024


Prepared my machine for the OCC 2024 edition
============================================

For the 2024 edition of the Old Computer Challenge I am using an
Acer Aspire One 522 POVE6.

This is a laptop from about 2011. It has an 10.1 inch display with a
resolution of 1280x720. It comes with an old fashioned spinning disk.

Some other specs:

* CPU: AMD C-60 APU with Radeon HD Graphics
* GPU: Wrestler [Radeon HD 6290]
* RAM: 768MiB

As you can guess, this is not a fast machine.

Operating system
----------------
I wanted to enter the challenge with an OpenBSD machine. However, the
WiFi chip of this Acer Aspire is not supported by OpenBSD, so I
installed FreeBSD.

I installed it with ZFS as file system.

No Xorg/X11
-----------
The rules of the 2024 edition are quite flexible.

In the previous versions of the challenge I have had a fair share
of slow computers. To Make This Version Interesting Again, I will
go without graphical desktop. No Xorg or X11.

Terminal font
-------------
The first thing that had to be configured, is the terminal font.

I want to be able to have two panels (in tmux) or two windows
(in Emacs) side-by-side. Prahou was so kind to point me to
`vidfont'.

One can set the terminal font with `vidcontrol -f <fontname>',
where <fontname> is one of the fonts in `/usr/share/vt/fonts'.

I opted for the smallest, `spleen-5x8'.

To make this option permanent, add the following line to your
`/etc/rc.conf':

    allscreens_flags="-f spleen-5x8"

Reading the filenames in the vt/fonts directory, this font is the
smallest, giving the most chars per line. On the readability there is
some room for improvement. It is hard to determine if a char is
uppercase or lowercase.

The font spleen-6x12 is more readable. I created two small
shell-scripts, `bigger.sh' and `smaller.sh', to easy switch between
5x8 and 6x12.

Capslock as Control
-------------------
To use the Capslock key as extra Control key, you have to select
a keyboard map.

This is easy. Use the command `kbdmap' to open a dialog window.
Select the keyboard map you want to use. The application closes
and shows the line you have to add to your `/etc/rc.conf'.

In my case, I had to add the following line:

    keymap="us.ctrl.kbd"

Suspend
-------
Hitting Alt-Ctrl-Space starts some kind of suspend mode,
either suspend-to-disk or hibernation. The power light goes
out and the WiFi-led blinks once in a while.

To prevent this from happening, I added the following line
to /etc/sysctl.conf:

    hw.acpi.suspend_state=NONE

Installed some software    
---------------------------
To get started, I installed some packages, like aspell, git, GnuPG,
links and lynx, password-store, rcs, texinfo, and of course emacs
(nox). I'm not sure if this is enough, but one can always install
another package when the pops up during the challenge,

Delete chars in Emacs
---------------------
In Emacs, to get Backspace and Delete working, I had to add
the following line in my `~/.emacs':

    (normal-erase-is-backspace-mode 1)

See you at the OCC
------------------
Read more about the challenge on
http://occ.deadnet.se
or
gopher://occ.deadnet.se/1/users/

We love to see you at the Old Computer Challenge channel,

    #oldcomputerchallenge on irc.libera.chat

or join the forum on occ.deadnet.se.

When you write about your OCC experiences, please let us know. You can
submit the URL of your blog, phlog or gemini capsule using `nc'. See
http://occ.deadnet.se for how to do this.

Happy OCC-ing!



Last edited: $Date: 2024/07/12 11:27:33 $