A Bulletin Board from the backside of the internet

I recently dragged out an Acer Aspire 3500 from a storage unit I was renting... it is from I guess mid or early 2000s? Boots with Manjaro from 2013 with 3.10 Linux kernel, and works surprisingly snappy.

I am detailing it all on this post on my blog, and so far am thinking of making it into something to play music in my garage/workshop which is separate to my house. I do have ethernet to the shed which might be handy as wifi on the Acer doesn't work at least under Manjaro, and it has a headphone jack - so now I need to work out what to run on it to play music from my (proxmox based) NAS. I am not opposed to running and lxc container to run something for sharing the music, but that might be beyond the scope of the challenge... which I have basically set for myself to utilise old hardware to fill an actual need instead of it going to landfill. (Or more realistically, otherwise being in a box for another decade or so).

That's pretty sweet tbh! Laptops of that era don't get any love what so ever. That being said, they're mostly just shiny garbage. But still! Approved.

Very true hah. Celeron inside

I friend is suggesting I pacman -Syu and see if I can bring it to current

Oh my, I was looking to purchase my first new laptop around 2007/8; but a median machine of that era was just a pile of shiny trash (glossy screens, yuck!), so ended up getting a second-hand Thinkpad ^^

Around that time, Asus made a really cool move to bring the insanely cheap EEE PC to the market - that thing was waayyy too underpowered to run Windows Vista, and had a big hand in keeping XP supported & alive until ~2014. They basically ran their own "old computer challenge" at scale, and turned the eyes of the industry for a hot moment, making everyone reconsider the real hardware requirements of contemporary computing.

I feel like with M-series Macs, Apple did the exact opposite: my M1 felt insanely snappy on day 1, but I have a feeling that the software (most notably: JS-heavy websites) is now yet again catching up with hardware and just getting slower again. Maybe a $200ish Chromebook-like laptop with built-in aggressive ad blocker and 20h of usable battery life could turn that tide again?

And I am done. https://the.teabag.ninja/old-computer-challenge.html

Very happy with how this challenge prompted me to end up with a usable machine for playing music in my garage that otherwise would be going to the tip, and learned a few things along the way (like mounting a samba share in the terminal).

It ended up with:

- Void Linux 32bit base (no X/Wayland)
- Wifi works!!!
- Alsa, Samba, and MusikCube packages added.

And thats it.

i need more terminal pipe-drawn apps in my life