Old Computer Challenge 5 (2025)

After skipping the last year Old Computer Challenge I’m back at it with friends at IRC channel[^1] with the idea of using low specs computer or setup for a whole week of July 13th to 19th.

Operating system

I planned to use OpenBSD 7.7 but at the very last minute installed NetBSD 10.1. The reason for that is quite simple - openbsd is unbearably slow, even for this challenge that expects a slowdowns in routine tasks compared to modern computers, I can’t even say it is a meaningful handicap. Lots of OpenBSD features aimed for security, and it takes a huge toll on overall performance on ~25 years old hardware.

Hardware

The time hath cometh! I am using rebuilt and battle-ready replica of my very first computer, that I had back in early 00s.

At first I had an OS installed on CF card, connected via IDE adapter, but turns out those are really slow and most of the processes on openbsd were held in ‘biowait’ status. I have a 160gb SATA hard drive connected through another IDE adapter, so using it now and it is much better. I think rotary drives are still good thing even after SSD became cheap, reliable and widespread.

I thought 128mb RAM might be way too crumped for the modern OS, and it still might be since I postponed setting everything up properly to the very last day; just in case I ordered some more RAM (2 sticks of 256mb SDRAM) a week ago, but don’t know how much will it take to arrive.

Software

This part hasn’t change much since occ2023, I’m still using mutt, irssi and nano. Firefox obviously won’t be able to run on this box, browsers are the hardest part of the challenge for lots of people I think. I’ll have to figure something out in that regard as well, will use lynx for the time being to be able to access WWW at least in some way.

WM is ‘stock’ netbsd CTWM for now, I plan to fix my usual setup with dwm+dmenu+dwmstatus here.

The Journey

Just as before I’ll try to do a small writeups about quirks and hiccups and fun moments I encounter right here every day for the next week.

My good friends at http://occ.deadnet.se have a list of blogs of people doing this challenge - be sure to check them out! Lots of awesome skilled people there.

Day 1

I still have to type and build this page on my main rig - at least via SSH. The reason being is that the setup on the Celeron is still not finished, and I need at least nano editor and golang and hugo to publish those pages. Golang should be interesting because of memory constraints. Maybe it pushes me to some other SSR with more lightweight footprint, maybe even follow trends and write one of my own :D

[^1] #oldcomputerchallenge at libera.chat