# Old Computer Challenge - day 3

I started the day with the usual unplug, battery out, wifi card out,
half a dozen reboots to get linux booted. 


## Software rot

The day has been consumed by finding and downloading software
dependencies and compiling them. This was made doubly difficult by
the fact that the reason I'm doing this is because none of the
installed web browsers will connect to large number of websites via
HTTPS. It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Luckily some of the
sites I needed to download software from still had ftp servers
available. For the ones that didn't I resorted to downloading the
source to my normal computer and then using scp to bring them across
to the laptop. Needless to say old machines take a lot of time to
build code from source, especially large packages like gnutls which
have quite a lot of dependencies.

I figured if I could update gnutls then I could at least build lynx
and maybe a light graphical web browser so I can have some access to
modern websites without cheating and using my normal machine in some
way.

By lunchtime I decided I'd had enough for a while and decided to go
out and do some gardening[1].


## The afternoon 

Later in the afternoon I got back to it and managed to assemble the 
remaining software dependencies to build lynx, either from source or 
binary packages. The first attempt at building lynx resulted in no
SSL/TLS in spite of adding the necessary flags to the configure line.

./configure --with-ssl=/usr/local/lib --with-gnutls=/usr/local/lib
--enable-gnutls-compat

I figured something must have gone wrong with my build of gnutls;
sure enough I hadn't enabled openssl compatibility, so I had to
rebuild it again.

I'm currently waiting for lynx to rebuild, fingers crossed it works
this time ...


[1](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Self-sufficiency/230322-Gardening-diary.md)