Old Computer Challange 2023, Days 1 & 2

  I've been on an impromptu business trip for Monday and most of
  Tuesday, which meant two things:

1 Having to use my work laptop most of the time, with all the modern
  stuff this brings with it.

2 Not being able to fiddle with my old computer setup. I arrived late
  on Tuesday and barely was able to gopher around a bit.

  So let's dig back a bit and let me tell you about the current system
  I'm running

 Hardware
  
  This is a Dell Wyse 3030 "Terminal". The original version came out
  sometimes in 2014 under a slightly different name and with more
  storage, being a Windows-based thin client. My system being the
  Linux-based thin client, 4 gigabytes of MMC storage have to
  suffice.

  Powered by a dual core Celeron, able to hit 2.17 Ghz. Of course,
  while doing the OCC thing, it's clamped down to 1 core and the
  minimum possible CPU frequence, which is 500 Mhz.

  2 gigs of RAM, minus what the GPU uses, OS limits this to 512 Mb
  during this frugal week.

  Speaking of the GPU, it has two display ports, one of which
  is currently equipped with a DVI dongle, connecting it to my
  main monitor, a glorious 23 inch "Cinema Display HD" from Apple.
  Yes, the acrylic monstrosity from 2002. On its three feet, it's
  always angled slightly back, the total bezel area is larger than
  some other displays, and the color fidelity isn't as good as you
  see on contemporary IPS or even OLED screens.

  But I love it, and I'm not just using it for this challenge, it
  has been my main display for most of the year.

 Software

  In my previous post here, I've said that I'm just going to put
  Slackware on that machine, and be done with it.

  Well, that didn't work out. Slackware doesn't have a high opinion
  about dependency management for its packages, so it works best when
  you just install the whole shebang on your machine. 

  Granted, this is quite okay with most systems. Even if you include
  all the desktop environments, the total Linux kernel source and
  a full-fledged LaTeX environment, you're not breaking 20 gigs. 

  And there's a certain joy about having every piece of software
  at your immediate beck and call. Want to try that weird editor,
  KDE app or programming language? It's there, no need to even
  install a package. It's what made exploring a Linux system fun
  for me in the late 90s.

  Alas, I don't have 20 gigs here. I tried a few things:

1 Manually selecting packages to get a minimal system.
  Didn't work out that well, even with moderate demands you
  break the 4 Gig limit easily. With some research I probably
  could've come up with something that gives me a good GUI
  system with no broken dependencies, but I wasn't looking
  for spending that much time.

2 Install everything on an external drive. So I grabbed a
  64 GB USB 3 stick, connected it to the single USB 3.1
  port this machine had, and went along installing.

  Only to find out, that the system could boot from there,
  but the OS couldn't find its data partition afterwards.

  Probably some issue with how external devices are named,
  so if I were able to spend the time to find the correct
  LILO configuration and initrd invocation, this might
  be possible. But again, patience is not my strong suit
  right now.

3 Try a more minimal Linux distribution.
  I went with Alpine, as I always wanted to try that out,
  outside of containers. So a small footprint was a given,
  and I checked out how hard it is too install on such
  a minimal system.

  And to no big surprise, it worked out fine. Granted, as
  with all modern systems, once you installed a few
  applications and dev environment stuff, the megabytes
  accrue, but I got a graphical environment like I had
  in the early 00s. More about that later...

  As a final note: Of course I'm using the Alpine email
  package to read my email on that Alpine operating
  system...