Slow computing

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My primary record is at

https://www.k58.uk/pages/stuff/old-computer-challenge-v3.html

I'm duplicating stuff here for giggles. I last used gopher around
1994. Might have guessed: UTF-8 issues!
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   This year's Old Computer Challenge runs from Monday 10th July 2023 and
   finishes on Sunday 16th July. People are documenting the challenge
   using...

     * a discussion thread on Sol??ne Rapenne's Mastodon account
     * a Mastodon tag #oldcomputerchallenge
     * and a Web site, with links to other participants' pages and details of
       a mailing list for the project.

   My project for the week of the challenge is to use graphical applications
   as much as possible to get some maths teaching notes written.

   I'm using my Thinkpad T42 with one Centrino core pegged at 600MHz and
   512Mb of physical RAM. The 40Mb hard drive rotates at a stately 5400 rpm.

   The software includes...
     * A default slackware install minus the Plasma/KDE desktop
     * Fluxbox window manager with more or less default configuration started
       using startx
     * Seamonkey provides the Web browser along with email and a Web page
       editor.
     * OpenOffice 4.1.14 provides a wordprocessor, presentation package and a
       spreadsheet.
     * Gnumeric spreadsheet as it has really good charting and can run
       simulations more quickly than OpenOffice Calc.
     * Lyx which is a graphical editor for LaTeX.

   My previous Old Computer Challenge pages are

     * 2021: The T42 with OpenBSD 6.9 until its fan stopped working (fixed
       now)
     * 2022: Using a Thinkpad X60 with OpenBSD 7.1 and a USB WiFi dongle

Day 0: July 9th

   I'm editing this Web page in Seamonkey's graphical Web page editor. Some
   of the mark-up might be a bit redundant but the Web pages usually render
   OK on most Web browsers.

   I'm just reading through some of the Web/gopher/gemini pages linked from
   http://occ.deadnet.se/.  I've subscribed to the mailing list that Tekk has
   kindly set up: I used the old convention of sending an email to the
   address given with subject 'subscribe'. It hasn't bounced which is a good
   sign, but I have not yet had any kind of automatic reply from the list
   manager software.

   Below is the output from free -m with Seamonkey's three components running
   in a single thread, UXTerm and fluxbox...

 bash-5.1$ free -m
                total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
 Mem:             480         314          20          25         146         127
 Swap:           1023          75         948

   As you can see the T42 is using a tiny bit of swap. The key to managing a
   slow computer is to have a good idea what task you want to work on and
   load just the software you need. This morning is Web and mail. Tomorrow
   will be mostly OpenOffice and LyX.

   Below is part of the output from cpufreq-info...

   
   current policy: frequency should be within 600 MHz and 1.70 GHz.
                   The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                   within this range.
   current CPU frequency is 600 MHz.
   cpufreq stats: 1.70 GHz:0.30%, 1.40 GHz:0.04%, 1.20 GHz:0.03%, 1000 MHz:0.05%, 800 MHz:0.14%, 600 MHz:99.45%  (1028)

   I'm using Slackware's 'huge.s' kernel (the T42 can't support a PAE kernel)
   which I suspect is built with the ondemand CPU governor configured. My
   /etc/rc.d/rc.local file has the following commands which kick in when the
   kernel switches to userland...

 bash-5.1$ cat /etc/rc.d/rc.local
 #!/bin/bash
 #
 # /etc/rc.d/rc.local:  Local system initialization script.
 #

 cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave
 powertop --auto-tune

   So I think that I am as close as I can be to the rules without rebuilding
   a custom kernel.

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   Last update: 2023-07-09