lupi

Lupi

@lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

avatar by @citriccenobite

you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.​

i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi

I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory

they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"

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lupi
@lupi
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

as god intended

i picked up this almost-pristine Thinkpad T23 (termed The Stinky) for twenty bucks yesterday

i spent hours installing os/2 on this thing last night on a stream, then it got obliterated by running doom, literally, so i decided to do something i've been meaning to do for a while and installed one of the earliest linux revs I ever used on a contemporary machine. redhat 7.2 on a p3 thinkpad is The Correct Way of Things.

i gotta admit, the install process went smoother than i remembered. i think my memories of linux being Abjectly Miserable were more in line with redhat 5.0, which may have been the first version I ever used. this is pretty damn full-fat compared to what I thought I remembered.

of course, we have to be clear here - "smoother" means "it didn't force me to partition the disks by hand in gparted or kernel panic on startup until i recompiled X," because those are experiences that used to happen. i don't mean that it "just worked" because of course it didn't.

the thinkpad has an s3 savage of some stripe, and of course the included savage driver doesn't work with it. the vga driver barely works, it won't even go to 640x480 for some reason. the vesa driver doesn't work for unknown reasons. so despite the installer working just fine in X, i had no graphics after install. this, however, is completely par for the course and was considered ordinary in the era as far as i know.

because this is a thinkpad, you can of course get a dozen different websites with step by step solutions for solving these problems, including a handcrafted XF86Config and the exact patched S3 driver you need. and that worked. again, this is exactly what I would have done in 2001, just, via the links browser, because its SSL library still worked at that time.

networking on this machine does work perfectly, of course, minus the inability to reach any modern HTTPS website. i ended up closing the machine and going to bed, however, when I discovered that there was no audio, and did not want to go down that rabbithole.

i wonder if there's anyone doing "tenfourfox" style hypermiling, like a website somewhere with a little cache of modernish apps compiled for early 2000s or 90s linux. maybe i should be the guy who starts that

the wildest thing about this laptop is that the battery works perfectly

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

ecn
@ecn

I'm tempted to install RHL7.3 on an era-appropriate Dell laptop and go mad scientist and see if I can compile a newer version OpenSSL and get it to connect with at least TLS 1.2.

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Siph
@Siph

Have you heard about WebOne? https://github.com/atauenis/webone It’s a very convenient and straightforward HTTPS -> HTTP proxy you can run on your local network, it’s great to experiment with older devices and OS that don’t support TLS 1.2 or even HTTPS at all. I use it pretty often when I want to check if a website fits into the Nintendo DS Browser’s RAM and how it looks on there

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

will advise, i have already found that it has Limitations, but that's unavoidable

i found that if a site has no http redirector, webone will just sit there and spin eternally. to fix this, i had to go in and add an "always use https for this domain" exception - and idk if it supports wildcards, but at least it doesn't match subdomains implicitly. so if math.college.edu only responds on http, you won't be able to access it until you add "math.college.edu" to the exceptions; it's not enough to add "college.edu"

it also requires dotnet which is a royal pain to install on linux if it's not in your package manager

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plumpan
@plumpan

YESS BEAUTIFUL NON TRACKPAD THINKPAD I love

I have the X series 12" version of this and it's adorable. Unfortunately not enough power to run any modern linux + DE smoothly, I had used it to mess around with various framebuffered console modes. Still love it though. Would be curious to hear your thoughts on it running a more modern linux, as boring as doing that ultimately is. "It's the same but slower".

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plumpan
@plumpan

I'm fully cl- pointbrained, and for a time palm detection sucked so I've got a soft spot for those. Totally understand how others would loath it though. It's a hot take in hardware form. Also I use the bowl nubs, I got no idea how people use the eraser ones.

It should run anything still built with a i386/i686 version. Debian still ships that new. Supposedly OpenSUSE does as well but I couldn't find the download for it. Obviously there's plenty of tiny or esoteric distros that also support it... you don't strike me as the Gentoo type.

I'm now curious what web browser support on those is, maybe they try and compile a 32 bit iceweasel???

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nortti
@nortti

one problem currently is that llvm and stuff based on it (e.g. rust) assume SSE2 support on i686 builds, even though that was only introduced in pentium 4, which means firefox is straight out of the question unless you set up your own i586-linux toolchain and build from source. if javascriptcore still supports 32-bit, using gtkwebkit might be the best choice here

EDIT: for syys me and my partner used Links 2 with framebuffer support. on non-gentoo that might be harder to come by, but if you have enough resourced to run X11 most Links 2 binaries have graphics mode usable with links -g

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