# Day 1

I start today as a normal day. I grab for my phone, and look on
Pachli, my mobile fediverse app of choice, to see what won my poll
this morning.

Wait, people are talking about this being the first day? Crap.

At least I already put away my super powerful desktop in favor of
a couple of 2000s computers.

The big theme for this challenge is the pubnix. I'm going to use
SDF, as it's the account I have.

See, I've always enjoyed the idea of pubnix as a social network
for older computers, but I've never really put it into practice.
I've honestly always used the new shiny thing despite my interest
in old computers. This week, it's time to put my words into
practice.

So yesterday, I was setting up my computers for the challenge. The
graphics card didn't want to be used on my P4, so no video... and
the DVI connectors I had somehow didn't fit in the DVI connectors
of my PowerMac. So hmm.

I ordered a couple of DP to VGA cables and went to bed.

Thankfully, I did have a couple of old computers ready to go. Right
now, I'm using my Dell Dimension D630 to type this up. If you follow
me on Mastodon, you can see a post I made right before I went to
bed where I took a screenshot of Haiku here[0].

My choice of Haiku was inspired by a post[1] Shyra on my instance
made on Haiku. I knew it had Wi-Fi driver compatibility on par with
FreeBSD, which worked great on my laptop, so I figured I'd give
Haiku a whirl.

So far, Haiku has been a nice OS. Honestly, having never used BeOS,
it reminds me of the Classic Mac OS greatly. In fact, unlike CUA
where you use the control key, you use the alt key, which on most
PCs is in the same spot as the Command Key on Macs. As much as I
like Mac OS X, I do wish I did get to see the world where BeOS
became the new Mac OS.

Anyways, I'll be heading to an auction this afternoon, so I probably
won't be using computers too much. I may obtain even more of these
older computers, but I'm not betting on it.

I was worried about the installation process of 9Front for my
Thinkpad, as I don't have any eligible Unix laptops at the moment.
However, it turns out Haiku can use the dd command as any Unix can.
I'll give another update when I figure out how disks work on Haiku
and 9Front is installed.

Decided on OpenBSD instead for said computer for reasons, one of
which being "I need a travel router on the trip" and the other
being that I didn't want to make the OpenBSD people who voted
heavily in favor of OpenBSD on the first poll to feel upset because
I ran a somewhat rigged poll. :-P

I'll probably give the SDF Plan 9 server a look though.

Since I think a huge part of the reason why stt was so popular was
the challenge of travelling with Plan 9 though, I think I'll bring
a fediverse classic[2] along with me too. Yes, *that* one.

The eeePC excels in X11-less work, as the monitor has inverted
colors. That makes it mildly annoying for actual graphics work,
but between that and its small for its era 512 MB of RAM, console
is the way to go, and I quite like NetBSD's console compared to
other Unix consoles. Probably a familiarity thing.

Huh. While making install media and not having much to do, I started
to feel bored. This is probably a good thing.

Well, I just broke my ultrawide monitor. Go me.

I think that's enough excitement for one night. I'm going to bed,
and starting tomorrow will be Day Two.

---

[0]: https://bitbang.social/@sinza/112777413002526894
[1]: https://bitbang.social/@shyra/112761360971548358
[2]: https://bitbang.social/@sinza/109360543932002061