I’m running OpenBSD on a 2004 Centrino single core laptop (haven’t updated in a year or so) and it’s… ok. You can work with it if you have patience, but using Chrome is a little tedious. This is a good data point, I think a dualcore CPU adds that little bit of power that makes you able to work in a relatively normal way (it’s not the 400MHz).
I have FreeBSD 10 on a laptop from around 2001. It’s old enough to have a real serial port and I leave it in my cellar for when I need to get a serial console onto my NAS to fix things. It’s actually the only laptop I own myself and got somewhat more use until not so long ago when my employer was forced to provide me with one for home working during lockdown. It has no USB ports and the CD drive seems to have broken now so I fear any further upgrade attempts may break it beyond repair. Might have swapped it to NetBSD otherwise.
I’ve used Debian on Thinkpad 760ED and a 760XD, both from around 1997 until a few years ago.
I used the 760ED for quite some years from around 2000 until 2006 or 2007 or so when I bought my first new Thinkpad a T61 (which died several times—IIRC once on warranty—due to an overheating NVidia GPU).
The 760XD was a “performance” on the Vintage Computing Festival Europe a few years ago: A fresh install of a back then current Debian release on a laptop from the 90s. Starting with Debian 3.0 Woody because it was the last release which was installable from floppies, and then dist-upgrading several times until IIRC Debian 8 Jessie.
Unfortunately Debian kicked out Pentium 1 support with the release of Debian 9 Stretch, so the last Debian I upgraded them to was Debian 8 Jessie. See also this Retro Computing Stack Exchange question of mine from back then.
Those two laptops still exist and I should probably apply security updates once before Jessie ELTS finally goes EoL. Probably a nice holidays side project.
Oh, and a funny coincidence: I know Matto (the author of the linked article) personally. Well, actually not so a big coincidence. We’re both into retro computing for quite a while. :-)
Yeah Debian is my default so I was deliberately looking to run something different to play around on that machine. When I did this first a few years ago, a few distros had already stopped supporting 32 bit processors and it’s already gotten worse.
Answered my own question, was in the mount_mfs manpage,
-P file
If file is a directory, populate the created mfs file system with
the contents of the directory. If file is a block device,
populate the created mfs file system with the contents of the FFS
file system contained on the device.
Keeping your home directory in a ramdisk sounds terrifying if you do any serious work on this laptop. It would be so easy to forget to move an important file to permanent storage! Not to mention that a 12-year-old laptop likely has very little battery life and can randomly fail in myriad ways, taking any in-progress work and temporary files with it…
I’m sure that this system works well with enough discipline, but I’d feel like it was an accident waiting to happen.
The link should be http://box.matto.nl/freebsd-13-on-a-12-year-old-laptop.html.
I’ve flagged the post as broken link since I can’t edit it anymore.
Are admins capable of fixing this? It seems it mostly gives negativ karma to the thread.
I’m running OpenBSD on a 2004 Centrino single core laptop (haven’t updated in a year or so) and it’s… ok. You can work with it if you have patience, but using Chrome is a little tedious. This is a good data point, I think a dualcore CPU adds that little bit of power that makes you able to work in a relatively normal way (it’s not the 400MHz).
I have FreeBSD 10 on a laptop from around 2001. It’s old enough to have a real serial port and I leave it in my cellar for when I need to get a serial console onto my NAS to fix things. It’s actually the only laptop I own myself and got somewhat more use until not so long ago when my employer was forced to provide me with one for home working during lockdown. It has no USB ports and the CD drive seems to have broken now so I fear any further upgrade attempts may break it beyond repair. Might have swapped it to NetBSD otherwise.
I’ve used Debian on Thinkpad 760ED and a 760XD, both from around 1997 until a few years ago.
I used the 760ED for quite some years from around 2000 until 2006 or 2007 or so when I bought my first new Thinkpad a T61 (which died several times—IIRC once on warranty—due to an overheating NVidia GPU).
The 760XD was a “performance” on the Vintage Computing Festival Europe a few years ago: A fresh install of a back then current Debian release on a laptop from the 90s. Starting with Debian 3.0 Woody because it was the last release which was installable from floppies, and then dist-upgrading several times until IIRC Debian 8 Jessie.
Unfortunately Debian kicked out Pentium 1 support with the release of Debian 9 Stretch, so the last Debian I upgraded them to was Debian 8 Jessie. See also this Retro Computing Stack Exchange question of mine from back then.
Those two laptops still exist and I should probably apply security updates once before Jessie ELTS finally goes EoL. Probably a nice holidays side project.
Oh, and a funny coincidence: I know Matto (the author of the linked article) personally. Well, actually not so a big coincidence. We’re both into retro computing for quite a while. :-)
Yeah Debian is my default so I was deliberately looking to run something different to play around on that machine. When I did this first a few years ago, a few distros had already stopped supporting 32 bit processors and it’s already gotten worse.
Could someone add some context about this option? I looked in the OpenBSD manpages for
mountandfstabbut didn’t find anything.I’m using the
mfsfilesystem infstabcurrently for an in-memory filesystem (/tmp) on OpenBSD and curious there’s an alternative way.Answered my own question, was in the
mount_mfsmanpage,I use FreeBSD 13 on a 10 year laptop - ThinkPad W520 - and it works flawlessly :)
… and that oldschool 7-row keyboard makes all the (positive) difference - different world.
Keeping your home directory in a ramdisk sounds terrifying if you do any serious work on this laptop. It would be so easy to forget to move an important file to permanent storage! Not to mention that a 12-year-old laptop likely has very little battery life and can randomly fail in myriad ways, taking any in-progress work and temporary files with it…
I’m sure that this system works well with enough discipline, but I’d feel like it was an accident waiting to happen.
Link is 404 :(
tis missing at the end of the URLI raise you an
l.