Installed Raspberry Pi Desktop (Debian Bullseye) on my MSI Wind U100 of 2009 vintage (Atom N270 + 2GB RAM) using an SSD. While the installation process went smoothly (longer than expected though), the end result was hardly more useful than WinXP on HDD previously on this computer. 🙄 Firefox 52.9.0 ESR and LibreOffice 5.4.7.2 are no less useful than Chromium 103 and LibreOffice 7, respectively.

I run raw Debian with no desktop manager on my atom, asking much else out of an atom is pain and suffering

myrsnipe wrote on 2022-07-22, 00:45:

I run raw Debian with no desktop manager on my atom, asking much else out of an atom is pain and suffering

Well, I wanted to give it a try and see if those words were true:

If you have an old computer that is no longer powerful enough to run a modern commercial operating system, try Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop: it can often make the computer usable once more.

With 2GB RAM the Atom N270 can still handle low-level tasks (web browsing, basic office software) under WinXP without much problems.

About the early Atom I wonder if in linux had maybe a better "GPU" support beside its single 32bit core would limit it too to older kernels. More powerful Atoms like the DDR3 versions once became dual core x64 were more capable to run more modern o.s. (beside at a late Pentium 4 speed level maybe a bit better in multitasking) but limited anyway by the usual complex PowerVR iGPU situation which ended with a 32bit only Win (with a sort of latest good driver) or 64bit linux with a late DRM compatible cpu demanding 2D driver beside is still updated. I'm not sure about the GMA linux support of the N270 config, does a drm/mesa support exists?

gave the vp6 a run at linux mint for modern web it kept up but youtube was a pain until the res was set to low. If a 20 year old piece of retro can do what we take for granted a bit slower now then theres plenty of landfill to be saved I don't collect much I want useful things like a prescott machine it isn't the best but I put a new PSU and it runs great for dual xp and linux mint.
Pity microsoft left wAy before linux but thats ok runs full res youtube too. My AMD A10 machine got a infection had to break the RAID stripe and then it said usb over voltage but i remembered that happened before and stopped thinking of scrap that i uninstall the bios bootable RAID going back to single disk boot.
Its in the to do basket. I know it'll come back to life.
This post was brought to you by abit vp6 boop beep beep boop 🤣

Sombrero wrote on 2022-07-17, 11:18:

If the card needs some poking in order to work the agp connector on the card could simply be a bit dirty and cause issues.

Easy to rule out and a toothbrush + some IPA is a bit cheaper than a PCI V5.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-07-17, 10:15:

At a guess I would think that it doesnt like the AGP slot, the Voodoo5 5500 really saw the AGP slot as a souped up PCI slot and thus didn't use much if any of the advanced AGP features and was limited to AGP 2x (Really 1x). Not even sure how its running on a more modern AGP slot but I'm guessing its a Universal slot, you might want to consider a different GPU and move that old girl back to a true AGP 2x board where it'll likely be happier.

But to answer your direct question, Yes its the Voodoo5 5500 its a picky bitch even when working correctly and is well known for having AGP issues/conflicts.

I did so today and it changed nothing.
But it appears that it was not about poking the card. What made it to work was the simple fact of retrying... Turning the PC on 4 or 5 times without doing anything else makes the card work.
Funnily enough, I got the "missing graphics card" beeps for the 3 first tries. For the 4th one, the one and only beep confirming everything works but black screen.
The 5th try was the good one.
After that I let the system in the BIOS menu for 40 minutes.
After doing so, i was able to turn on and off the PC as much as I wanted without any issue.
Wonder what will happen after a long time off. Probably back to issues. That looks like a capacitor problem to me. The card's are solid and it wouldn't explain why it works perfectly on a SS7 board though.
Please let me know if you have other ideas.

CrFr wrote on 2022-07-21, 21:03:

Repaired and cleaned this IBM Model M2 today. It was pretty clean to start with, but it had couple of problems. One capacitor ha […]
Show full quote

Repaired and cleaned this IBM Model M2 today. It was pretty clean to start with, but it had couple of problems. One capacitor had leaked, and it also had bad connection between key mat ribbon cable and the PCB.

This is one of times when I should have done a bit of research before starting the project. Opened it, and all the fking springs scattered around the room 😁 Added fun was to figure out which holes are supposed to have springs. All of them are not populated. This must be the most annoying keyboard design I've ever opened. And of course leaked cap had eaten away the solder pads.

But in the end, result is nice. It works now, and looks like brand new keyboard. Sure it is probably one of the nastiest buckling spring keyboards, but I like how it sounds and feels.

IMGP2219_.jpg

I like M2s because they are a "normal" size and a lot less of a space hog than an M, even the M compact is pretty big. Even as the "worst" M variety it's still better than 90% of the random keyboards out there.

Installed WinGroove on the Versa M/75 last night....I now have MiDi in Windows games, and it sounds awesome. Not sure why people say it has a major performance penalty on 486s though...built a huge city in SimCity 2000 and the Versa was screaming along as usual. Ripped through some Shanghai II as well.

Got to wonder if theres something like this for DOS.

Today I rebuilt an everyday home/office machine with a Core2 Quad Q8200, 8GB DDR3@1333, G41, USB3.0 PCI-EX1, SSD SATA2, linux. I am not sure if it's better this low end Quad cpu or the E8600 at 3,33Ghz I used when I need a faster but old config. I imagine the more cores doesn't make much difference compared to such faster dual core.

I spent yesterday trying to get an Atari 2600 up and running, but for whatever reason, I am stuck with zero voltage actually reaching the Voltage regulator. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

386SX wrote on 2022-07-22, 17:39:

Today I rebuilt an everyday home/office machine with a Core2 Quad Q8200, 8GB DDR3@1333, G41, USB3.0 PCI-EX1, SSD SATA2, linux. I am not sure if it's better this low end Quad cpu or the E8600 at 3,33Ghz I used when I need a faster but old config. I imagine the more cores doesn't make much difference compared to such faster dual core.

I was just browsing some quad reviews, it was seeming like about 2.66 in a quad was equal 3.0 Ghz dual in about 80% of the stuff, with the quad running away only in fully multithreaded multicore aware applications. However, you can play with core affinity per app, so you can basically give a couple of tasks core 3 or core 4 all to themselves, given the first two might be more likely to be assigned by OS.

CrFr wrote on 2022-07-21, 21:03:

Repaired and cleaned this IBM Model M2 today. It was pretty clean to start with, but it had couple of problems. One capacitor ha […]
Show full quote

Repaired and cleaned this IBM Model M2 today. It was pretty clean to start with, but it had couple of problems. One capacitor had leaked, and it also had bad connection between key mat ribbon cable and the PCB.

This is one of times when I should have done a bit of research before starting the project. Opened it, and all the fking springs scattered around the room 😁 Added fun was to figure out which holes are supposed to have springs. All of them are not populated. This must be the most annoying keyboard design I've ever opened. And of course leaked cap had eaten away the solder pads.

But in the end, result is nice. It works now, and looks like brand new keyboard. Sure it is probably one of the nastiest buckling spring keyboards, but I like how it sounds and feels.

IMGP2219_.jpg

Oh I didn't see this and I have just joined your SPRINGS EVERYWHERE club 😁 Just learnt the hard way to open an IBM PS/1 buckling spring keyboard!

I don't suppose you took a photo of what spring was where before you closed it up did you? I'm about to try to do it but yeah I need to figure out where the springs should go 😁

386SX wrote on 2022-07-22, 09:52:

About the early Atom I wonder if in linux had maybe a better "GPU" support beside its single 32bit core would limit it too to older kernels. More powerful Atoms like the DDR3 versions once became dual core x64 were more capable to run more modern o.s. (beside at a late Pentium 4 speed level maybe a bit better in multitasking) but limited anyway by the usual complex PowerVR iGPU situation which ended with a 32bit only Win (with a sort of latest good driver) or 64bit linux with a late DRM compatible cpu demanding 2D driver beside is still updated. I'm not sure about the GMA linux support of the N270 config, does a drm/mesa support exists?

There are 32 bit 5.x kernals that will run fine on that system

My P4 3.2GHz HT system in running Linux Mint Debian Edition just fun. I updated it from LMDE4 which went through without a hiccup as well.

SteveC wrote on 2022-07-23, 22:05:

Oh I didn't see this and I have just joined your SPRINGS EVERYWHERE club 😁 Just learnt the hard way to open an IBM PS/1 buckling spring keyboard!

I don't suppose you took a photo of what spring was where before you closed it up did you? I'm about to try to do it but yeah I need to figure out where the springs should go 😁

Welcome to the club 😀

Luckily, I took a photo before opening the case. Then mirrored it, so it was easier to find the right slots for the springs looking from the other side. Here's the photo.

Mine was very clean for such an old keyboard. I was surprised by how clean it was, and that was the reason why I took the photo 😀

CrFr wrote on 2022-07-23, 22:40:

Welcome to the club :) […]
Show full quote

SteveC wrote on 2022-07-23, 22:05:

Oh I didn't see this and I have just joined your SPRINGS EVERYWHERE club 😁 Just learnt the hard way to open an IBM PS/1 buckling spring keyboard!

I don't suppose you took a photo of what spring was where before you closed it up did you? I'm about to try to do it but yeah I need to figure out where the springs should go 😁

Welcome to the club 😀

Luckily, I took a photo before opening the case. Then mirrored it, so it was easier to find the right slots for the springs looking from the other side. Here's the photo.

Mine was very clean for such an old keyboard. I was surprised by how clean it was, and that was the reason why I took the photo 😀

Thanks 😀

This is literally the worst thing ever. Half way through putting the caps back on I found a spring on the floor. This can wait till tomorrow now!

Pulled the FitPC slim out of the tv setup. Wired up a new VGA capture setup with the Fosmon adapter.

Played and did some test captures with the NEC Versa M75 and DFI MediaBook. The DFI is naturall y aspirated to this setup but that ESS488 sounds rough. The M75 is clearly a higher end PC and WinGroove might allow for some great Windows 311 gameplay.

Got youtube vids up to October now. Keeping December and September free for #septandy and #dosscember respectively. Going to try and do that more this year.

Next thing will be getting the Tandy 1000 A ready for September.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-07-23, 20:47:

386SX wrote on 2022-07-22, 17:39:

Today I rebuilt an everyday home/office machine with a Core2 Quad Q8200, 8GB DDR3@1333, G41, USB3.0 PCI-EX1, SSD SATA2, linux. I am not sure if it's better this low end Quad cpu or the E8600 at 3,33Ghz I used when I need a faster but old config. I imagine the more cores doesn't make much difference compared to such faster dual core.

I was just browsing some quad reviews, it was seeming like about 2.66 in a quad was equal 3.0 Ghz dual in about 80% of the stuff, with the quad running away only in fully multithreaded multicore aware applications. However, you can play with core affinity per app, so you can basically give a couple of tasks core 3 or core 4 all to themselves, given the first two might be more likely to be assigned by OS.

Thanks. Testing this Q8200 I didn't remember it also had less L2 cache memory (4MB total shared by all cores) which make it an interesting entry level quad core cpu far from that +1Ghz with 6MB L2 cache of the E8600. It seems like it should be like 30% slower in single and dual core benchmarks but up to 50% faster in quad core usage situations. But even real time encoding apps when forcing all the cpu core usage seems like not always using them all, even with many threads running for the same application sometimes using like 50% of all the cores not 100%. I suppose it's an interesting choice probably difficult to compare.

Meanwhile I'm trying on it a PCI-EX video card cause the G41 while still supported in linux and running enough well generally, using the system memory seems to limit the average speed while I suppose using any supported video card let the dual channel DDR3 memory to be used only by the cpu. The only faster cards I got are a Radeon 4650 1GB and the GT610 1GB. The first seems faster and well supported in linux but older. The GT610 is supported in old kernels by their own driver which is usable but discontinued, slower maybe with a better Video Decoding engine while running at high temperatures with not many positive sides beside the OpenGL 4.6 support (3.0 only for the RV730).

Documenting all of the repairs and fixes that I have done to Toshiba T3200SXC (re-designed PSU, LCD adapter, speaker, wireless connectivity), once I'm happy with the results I will post them to the open source thread, but current files/schematics are here. I also made a short video with the repair overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXoOnAgggJo

Also had some fun with 3D-printing PCB etching masks for the power supply for that computer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdvfGcdTSuA

Not strictly retro, but I got 3 of these shelves at Ikea at 1/4th the price due to going out of catalog, really tidied up some of my recent acquisitions. Have a 4th shelf off 90 degrees of where I'm standing with all kinds of motherboards, expansion cards, ICs, micro electronics, passives etc.

Never ever let your living room floor be your storage...

Edit:
Almost forgot, got a lead on getting an original IBM XT of some kind for free in the near future which is nice

MarkP wrote on 2022-07-23, 22:22:

386SX wrote on 2022-07-22, 09:52:

About the early Atom I wonder if in linux had maybe a better "GPU" support beside its single 32bit core would limit it too to older kernels. More powerful Atoms like the DDR3 versions once became dual core x64 were more capable to run more modern o.s. (beside at a late Pentium 4 speed level maybe a bit better in multitasking) but limited anyway by the usual complex PowerVR iGPU situation which ended with a 32bit only Win (with a sort of latest good driver) or 64bit linux with a late DRM compatible cpu demanding 2D driver beside is still updated. I'm not sure about the GMA linux support of the N270 config, does a drm/mesa support exists?

There are 32 bit 5.x kernals that will run fine on that system

My P4 3.2GHz HT system in running Linux Mint Debian Edition just fun. I updated it from LMDE4 which went through without a hiccup as well.

huh, I didn't think anybody would even bother with linux on a Pentium 4 even with a light desktop environment like XFCE. I imagine to have a passable browser experience a core 2 duo would've been the minimum