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Thinkpad experience

28/01/2022

Some days ago I found an old Thinkpad T41 that my dad found a lot of time ago in a dumpster. The original project was to install gentoo:

it would have taken me a lifetime, without considering that it could have crashed. And I have neither the patience nor the desire

Hardware

The pc is an old Thinkpad T41. All components are original and the specs are:

OS

At first I was undecided between:

  1. Debian: but then I discarded it because it uses systemd obviously bloated for this system, but still has a lot of support for the architecture;

  2. Void: because it uses runit, which is lighter than systemd. But not lighter enough;

  3. Alpine: the chosen one, because it use OpenRC, my favourite init system, and it uses musl, a lightweight alternative to glibc. It is not as complete as the latter but who cares: it runs faster!.

During the automatic installation of Alpine Linux, using the setup-alpine command, I issued system crash because, after the formatting of the root partition, the system couldn't mount properly mount the partion on /mnt.

I had to do a semi-automatic installation so, after setting various things, I manually partitioned and formatted the disk, mounted it and BOOM Alpine was installed! (after running setup-disk /mnt)

Features

The system uses a 100M ext4 boot partition, a 70G jfs root partition and a 1.2G swap partition. I have chosen a jfs filesystem for the root partiotion because I have read that use less system resources than zfs or ext4.

For the GUI I tried lot of window manager: ratpoison, swaywm, i3wm and icewm for example. Ratpoison was fast but often crashed while i3wm and swaywm were slower. Even if I still don't know how to properly rice it I went for IceWM since it was the lightest.

With flatpak installed I was able to install packages like telegram-desktop but not all applications are available for the architecture.

Issues

The wi-fi doesn't work and installing linux-firmware didn't work. I haven't tested other peripherals since I haven't used them in my life (what the f*ck does an infrared interface does on a pc???).

Final thought

19/02/2022

The laptop is pretty usable for office, LibreOffice works perfectly. Using firefox is not the best idea, but I think that other web browser can work pretty well.

Update

After a reinstall, I changed the filesystems

  1. /dev/sda1 (boot partition): is now a vfat partition;

  2. /dev/sda3 (root partition): is now an xfs partition, a more performing filesystem.

I also replaced Firefox with netsurf browser, which is MOOOOOOOOOOOORE lightweight.

Unfortunately, while I was using the zathura pdf reader, the system crashed and I had to force shutdown throught poweroff button. After that the system gave an Initramfs error...

I tried to reinstall Alpine Linux but also the live ISO got the same error. Fortunately sometimes the system boot up properly so, when I will have time, I will reinstall the whole thing.

Update of the update

After some adventure, for example bending the pin of the PATA connection, I got Alpine Linux back in the machine.

However, last week, I got the machine back up after a couple of months of break and I had the smartest idea to upgrade the system. Now the newer version of the Linux kernel in the Alpine repository requires FORCE_PAE in the computer, which I don't have.

Press F to pay respect to Alpine Linux. Time to find another distro for good ol' computers.