I used a 20 year old laptop to write this post

This year I’ve been trying to have more fun with computers. That is to say I already enjoy it and it is my number one hobby. But most of the time I am attempting to build a PC or a service that will be useful. My focus this year has been more about doing things for the hell of it and learning stuff along the way.

This weeks project has been configuring a nearly 20 year old Compaq laptop with Debian 12 and using it as my primary PC. I will say this has been one of the more enjoyable projects I’ve done this year. This is the second blog post I’ve written and published from it and I think it stay around for a while for days I’m feeling particularly nostalgic.

So here’s what it is, briefly what I used to set it up, and then some stuff I’ve learned.

Laptop info

Device: Compaq Presario V2615US (See pics here) - Originally released in 2004.

I received this laptop from a former coworker who was cleaning out a closet of old stuff at one of the offices. I’ve had it for a few years now and this thing is essentially brand new. It still has all of the original parts including a working battery, charger, and even has the original stickers around the keyboard.

It came with Windows XP and literally had never been booted. When I turned it on the first time it went through all the bloatware crap and the occasional XP welcome info. Back in 2004 this was considered a mid-range laptop and at that time I could never afford a laptop. I was rocking an eMachines desktop tower and was barely using computers. I grew up without one in the house until about the year 2000 and even then I wasn’t a “computer guy”. That didn’t happen until about 2008 when I learned about Linux.

Specs

• CPU: AMD Sempron 3000+
  • 1 core; 1 thread
  • 1.8GHz
  • i386
• GPU: ATI Radeon Xpress 200 IGP
• RAM: 384MB DDR333 (dual channel)
• Screen: 1280x768
• CD-ROM drive + DVD R/RW
• 2 USB 2.0 ports
• Video out: S-Video & VGA
• Networking: Ethernet (RJ45) & modem (RJ11)
• Battery: 6000 mAh
  • This is the original battery that came with the device.
  • Surprisingly, it still can hold 3904 mAh, or about 65% of the capacity.

Configuration in 2023

I know lots of people who love to set up retro computers as they were when they were released. For me, I get more joy out of making old computers modern. So after poking around XP for a while, I removed it and installed Debian 12 32-bit edition.

At first I had XFCE installed, but quickly realized this laptop was never going to run a full DE. Slow is an understatment when using a full modern DE and Firefox. For most of the setup process I disabled lightdm and worked straight from the console or I would ssh into it from my desktop so I could use my Obsidian notes and a full web browser.

I’m not going to go into how I set everything up. There are tons of places that list out commands and give technical advice. Rather, I want to describe how I’ve been using it and what tools I’ve been using to do that.

What I learned

Using OpenBox and learning more about window managers

As I mentioned, using a modern desktop environment was too painful. I then also tried the Trinity Desktop and it was better, but still not usable. For the most part it didn’t matter, though. I knew most modern apps were never going to be functional on such old. under-powered hardware. From the beginning my plan was to do nearly everything in a TUI/CLI interface.

But there are some apps I have to use with a GUI. In particular, its these four reasons:

1. Occasional web browser. Mostly for accessing some of my self-hosted services.
2. Password manager. I use KeePass and all the TUI/CLI interfaces are terrible. I then tried to migrate to pass for this one project and that was even worse.
3. Remote desktop access. There were some things that required more horsepower and so I want to be able to rdp with Remmina to a better machine for those tasks.
4. Accessing my phone using KDEConnect and scrcpy.

More on that last point later.

So, I needed to boot into x so I could occasionally use a GUI application. Instead of using another DE I ended up installing OpenBox as a floating window manager and skipping a DE altogether.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know anything about OpenBox or the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment. How I stumbled on it for this build was I watched a new Learn Linux TV video that is a review of Crunchbang++ which uses OpenBox, which I had never heard of and sent me down a huge rabbit hole.

After some reading and watching I installed OpenBox on this Compaq and it has been perfect for my needs. I don’t plan on doing any customizations because I only need it to open a few apps and play the occasional video, all of which I launch from the commandline.

Side note: I am completely infatuated with window managers now. For the last year or so I’ve just been done with modern distros. Especially anything that bills itself as “opinionated”. I’m just kinda… done with other people trying to tell me how I should use my computer. Its why I left Windows all those years ago and its why I’m tired of Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary, etc. There’s nothing wrong with those distros or the people who like to use them. They just aren’t for me anymore. I’m now much more interested in plain Debian with OpenBox.

Incorporating my phone

Most of time when I do these kinds of builds I try to include everything I could need as if its my only device. I had a realization that I shouldn’t pretend like my phone doesn’t exist. So I set it up to be a companion to this laptop.

First, I configured KDEConnect so I can share my clipboard and use KeePass on my phone and send passwords to the laptop. I’ve also been using it to send links to the laptop while I write notes and blog posts.

Second, I can use my phone for other apps that aren’t available or are a PITA to use on a TUI/CLI interface. Instead, I can use scrcpy to mirror my phone screen on the laptop and use the keyboard/touchpad to navigate my phone. This is perfect for chat apps like Discord and checking email. Yes there are TUI email applications, but they all are a huge PITA and not worth the effort IMO. Using scrcpy is also useful for using my Android web browser when w3m or netsurf. When connected the clipboard is bidirectional and is another way to send data to this Compaq laptop with minimal compute.

Writing blog posts

I’ve written this blog post on the Compaq laptop and I really like my workflow.

I have my Nextcloud mapped with WebDAV and I write these posts using my preferred text editor, Micro in markdown. The files are saved in my Obsidian vault, in my Nextcloud, so I can access them in my notes app. Since they are just raw markdown files, I can edit on any machine in any text editor. But, I like to have all my posts in Obsidian for future reference.

Once I’m done writing, I do a quick preview in Glow, and then copy the file to my blog VM via a nfs mount. I have a couple of mounts on this Compaq so I can access my NAS, push files to my blog, and move files to/from my desktop.

And that’s it. These posts have been written and published all via the commandline on a 20 year old laptop.

Apps I like for this build

Here’s a small list of some of the apps I’ve been using on this Compaq laptop and have really enjoyed.

• Micro and Glow. The combination of these two make writing and reading markdown great.
• Tmux. Its not saying much because I use tmux everywhere. I did customize it for this build with some better keyboard shortcuts (for me) and tab colors to make it easier to know where I am and what’s running.
• Newsboat for RSS reading and a new script I found for downloading YouTube videos in my feed to make playback better. I wrote about how I’m using Newsboat and this script in a separate post found here.
• tut for browsing and using Mastodon. I started with toot but tut can access notifications, which toot cannot.
• KDEConnect and scrcpy to fill in the gaps when I need to do something the Compaq can’t handle.

Now this is all to say I’m not a developer nor do I need to do a bunch of office stuff. I’m a contractor that views/edits spreadsheets, reads the news, watches some videos, browses the web, and writes awkward blog posts.

Yet, here I am with a 20 year old PC doing some basic computer stuff and learning new things along the way.

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