Debian Buster on The Thinkpad T43

Installed Buster on Saturday, wiping the Sid install I've made back on Juǹe.
Got fed up of installing updates all the time, every time... The T43 is wayy too slow and I use this one quite sparingly, so Sid will eventually break, besides, I love the predictability of Stable, what can I say?
Even tho I've used the non-free installer, with the extra proprietary drivers, and that the installer did recognized the T43's WiFi card, it was impossible to connect to the AP, so, in the end, did the install using the old and trusty PCMCIA WiFi card, simply removed it after the install is finished, and things went kosher.

The Risks of Not Updating Sid on a While

This is what happens when you don't update Sid in a while... 166 packages need to be updated.
Guess in this case, I haven't updated it on something like 3 weeks.

The Current Debian Desktop

And this time, the T43 edition.
What my beloved Thinkpad T43 desktop looks these days, sporting i3.
The open Emacs, on the lower Xterm, is showing off the ever cool Tronesque theme, my favorite Emacs theme at the moment.

Livin' On The Edge

I like to live dangerously.
Everything is A Ok after the updates and a reboot.

Intel Firmware Bearing Great Gifts

Besides enabling and activating the internal Wifi NIC, installing the Intel firmware, the ipw2200-bss.fw, seems to have fixed those nasty hangs coming back from Suspend I was suffering on the trusty T43.

The Current Debian Desktop

A little something, my i3 desktop screnshot from the trusty T43.
Have to fix a small glitch with the Wifi on i3status bar... Since I've changed from the PCMCIA card to the internal Wifi one, i3status went bollocks and refuses to show the strength percentage and the SSID name... Go figure...

T43: Kernel Panic After Suspend

My little and trusty T43 has a little problem...
It fails to come back from a Suspend, it simply hangs with error message.
Only option to bring it back to life is to do a hard reboot.

XFCE + i3 (on Sid & LM 19)

So, installed i3 on both Sid and on Linux Mint 19, as an add on of XFCE, just as an experiment and to see how things how.
I do have a full i3 lappie, the glorious T43, but I wanna see how everything goes running i3 along XFCE... There are a couple of site on the internet with instructions, but those are sort of "Xubuntu centrist" and they also give you advise regarding installing third party PPAs, but I don't want to do that.
What I did was to install a "minimal i3", like this:

sudo apt install i3 --no-install-recommends

After that, simply disabled (set to Never) "xfwm4" and "xfdesktop" on Session and then on Application Autostart, add an entry to start i3.

Logout and back in and you are done.

Or almost...

On Debian Sid:
You can use the Windows key as the $modifier.

On Linux Mint 19 (XFCE):
You have to use Alt as the $modifier. or all Hell breaks loose.

On both of them:
Edit the "~/.config/i3/config" file and comment the 'bar' entry, it is at the end of the file, if you don't you'll have the i3 Status bar (printing an error) as well as the XFCE Panel.

The Sid Week (2)

The other lucky winner from the Sid Week, my beloved T43 running Sid and i3.

Debian Sid Installation Tidbits (T60p & T43)

Some notes of the install process on both the T60p and the T43

After making a Debian net install from a Debian 9, choosing only the "SSH Server" and the "Standard System Utilities" options upon the Software Selection.
After the install is over (on an encrypted LVM, of course) installed:

sudo apt-get install sudo zile

Yes, sudo, I'm an old fart and I like to have a root account around, of course, closed to SSH, also I like to use Zile a lot, a minimal Emacs.
Then, with that installed, edited the "/etc/apt/sources.list" file, to look like this:

deb http://debian.unnoba.edu.ar/debian/ sid main
deb-src http://debian.unnoba.edu.ar/debian/ sid main

All the other entries are commented... If you are using proprietary drivers, the "/etc/apt/sources.list" file looks like this:

deb http://debian.unnoba.edu.ar/debian/ sid main

deb-src http://debian.unnoba.edu.ar/debian/ sid main

## Non Free

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian sid main contrib non-free

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian sid main contrib non-free

Again, all the other entries on the file are commented...
Proprietary drivers or not, after editing the file, issue a:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo apt-get autoremove

Then reboot the box:

sudo reboot

Some other programs I've installed to complete the setup:

sudo apt install apt-listbugs apt-listchanges

sudo apt install alsa-utils

(alsamixer to unmute (m) and then speaker-test to check buttons)

sudo apt install xorg

sudo apt install i3

sudo apt install links2

sudo apt install pmount (to mount USB drives as regular user)

The Sid Week

So, finally, Debian won... Sorry Void.
This past week installed Debian Sid on both the T60p and the T43, on the latter one, the little lappie that still delivers and that had its guts cleansed, installed i3, just for shit and giggles.
Boy oh boy, I have to say that I love that Window Manager...
Certainly see the myself using it a lot on the near future.
Also, I love how the T60p looks in this picture.

Void Linux on The Thinkpad T43

After de-gunking the hell out of it, installed Void (once again), just for shit and giggles.
No problem at all with the install, running XFCE, of course.
Now, I have to get somethings up and running on the little lappie... Will see if I have time next week.

De-gunking The CPU Fan of The T43

It was long overdue, but last night I finally did it.
Stripped open the old and by now mythic T43, re-pasted the CPU, but most importantly, cleaned the gunk from the fan vent, which has clogged to hell and back again.
The removed gunk can be seen on the right of the T43, besides the disgusting cotton ball used to clean the old thermal paste, it is that small grayish ball right by the green screwdriver.

Thinkpad T43: CLI Only Devuan

                                     @dv01
     ..,,;;;::;,..                   OS: Devuan 2.0 ascii
             `':ddd;:,.              Kernel: i686 Linux 4.9.0-7-686-pae
                   `'dPPd:,.         Uptime: 5h 58m
                       `:b$$b`.      Packages: 354
                          'P$$$d`    Shell: bash 4.4.12
                           .$$$$$`   CPU: Intel Pentium M 1.86GHz @ 1.866GHz
                           ;$$$$$P   GPU: AMD/ATI RV370/M22 [Mobility Radeon X300]
                        .:P$$$$$$`   RAM: 36MiB / 2018MiB
                    .,:b$$$$$$$;' 
               .,:dP$$$$$$$$b:'   
        .,:;db$$$$$$$$$$Pd'`       
   ,db$$$$$$$$$$$$$$b:'`           
  :$$$$$$$$$$$$b:'`               
   `$$$$$bd:''`                   
     `'''`                       
                                 
This is right after the initial install, with all the updates (and a new kernel) installed.
The only extra package is zile, so I can use a decent enough text editor.

It is using just a bit less than 1 GB:

  Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  udev                      1000M     0 1000M   0% /dev
  tmpfs                      202M  520K  202M   1% /run
  /dev/mapper/dv01--vg-root   35G 1019M   32G   4% /
  tmpfs                      5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
  tmpfs                      404M     0  404M   0% /run/shm
  /dev/sda1                  236M   60M  164M  27% /boot


It is using 24 MB of the 2GB of RAM available:

                total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
  Mem:           2.0G         24M        1.8G        520K        186M        1.7G
  Swap:          2.0G          0B        2.0G

Software to install:

zile
openssh-server
elinks
links2
rtv
mutt
mp3 player (Has to scrobble to last.fm, lloks like it'll me cmusfm)

Things to configure:

CLI cursor (Done. echo -en "\e[?6;2;32c")
CLI font
CLI color

Void Linux On The Thinkpad T43

Installed Void Linux (32 bits XFCE) on the T43 today.
It took about 40 minutes, no problem whatsoever.
Resource usage is minimal (I'm running on a non encrypted file system, tho), RAM usage is about 200 MB after booting.
Suspend works Ok.
Next step, or experiment, will be making an encrypted install.

Debian 9 On The Thinkpad T43

Net installing Debian 9 Stretch on the old and trusty laptop, mainly because I want something a bit more responsive than Linux Mint XFCE, either the plain vanilla one or the Linux Mint Debian version.
Took a couple of hours and everything seems to be working A Ok, except for the WiFi card, that doesn't work out of the box.
Right after the install is over, it uses nearly 3 GB of HDD.

Installed on an encrypted LVM for security.

Just Like Yesterday

Yesterday afternoon played a bit with Ubuntu MATE (16.04 of course) on my really, really old yet somehow trusty T43.
It comes with a built-in Global Menu implementation (go figure and yet, gloria aleluya for the initiative!!!) which works with most of the programs (Open Office doesn't, for instance).
This particular distro seems like a nice enough option for my ageing hulking beast, the PowerMac Dual Proc, the infamous QuickSilver.
Or perhaps, this is the answer to the eternal question: Reasons to get (or not) a PowerBook Nowadays

Testing CloudReady on a T43 & T60p

Yesterday installed CloudReady. (or actually wanted to) on my Thinkpad T43.
But before I get to that, I had to do a couple of things first to actually try to install it, or better yet, to actually create the USB boot drive from Neverware's CloudReady image.

I had to rename the downloaded bin file from "cloudready-free-43.1.37.bin" to "cloudready-free-43.1.37.bin.zip", the instructions on the PDF doc on their site mention that the file might be called either, on my case, it had to be called *.zip, otherwise it failed to create a proper USB boot drive, matter of fact, it failed to do anything.
It took the T43 about an hour and a half to actually make the USB boot drive from the finally renamed bin file.
After that I was able to boot from the USB drive, or actually not... On the Thinkpad T43 it simply failed, over and over and over, with a white screen with a countdown in the upper left corner, with a message and a spinning wheel:

Your system is repairing itself. Please wait.

After that, it rebooted by itself, and this repeated, over and over...

On the Thinkpad T60p things went much smoother, after only one of those cycles with the message "Your system is repairing itself. Please wait." it finally booted onto ChromiumOS.
Just for kicks, loaded a 250 GB SATA HDD on the T60p and installed the thing.

Installing the thing onto the T60p -after all the warning messages that you were about to destroy the data on your drive if you proceed- took about 30 minutes, and no surprises whatsoever.
The WiFi worked Ok (wasn't able to find a way to setup a fixed IP address, tho), the LCD resolution worked (1600x1200), etc.
Anyways, I think I'm not gonna keep that OS for the moment, this is just a test, it seems nice and all, but I don't see any improvement in terms of snappiness compared to the same T60p running Linux Mint XFCE.

The Resurrection Of The Late Acer TravelMate 2441

This last weekend got out of a pile of crap the late, late lappie ultra piece of crap that the Acer TravelMate 2441 is, slapped the HDD that once was on the Thinkpad T43 (that now runs Windows 7) and replaced one of the 1 GB RAM sticks with a 512 MB one (it has 1.5 GB of RAM).
The idea was to build a really crappy lappie that I could just drop and leave on the GF's house for good, so I can stop hauling one back and forth at every visit.
The poor thing is still as bad as it was, slow, hot and ugly as hell, but it is good enough to get by... At least until it goes down on flames...

Mint 17 Qiana on my Thinkpad T43

Installed Thursday night.
On top of what was my Lubuntu 14.04 installation, Linux Mint looks, at least IMHO, soo much nicer, Lubuntu looks nice, but there is not a homogeneous feeling accross apss, at all.
Everything seems to be working just fine, although the old, noisy, hot and lovely laptop it is really, really starting to show its age.