Category: Journal

The Retro Lab: Introduction

Welcome to my latest series of articles, The Retro Lab, where I will be detailing my excursions into the art and hobby of retrocomputing.

This article will serve as a general overview of what I hope to accomplish, and a bit about my background and why this will be fun for me 🙂 If you just want to see the meat of this, skip to the section “And now, in the present”.

My history with computers

When I was very young, my family had a 386 running DOS and Windows 3.1. The only thing I cared about were the games, of course. I don’t remember a lot from this era, because I was so young.

When we were with my grandpa, I loved to play on his XT clone. It was a Leading Edge Model D with 20MB disk running DOS. I inherited this computer when he passed and it is still in my closet. I treasure it. Some of the games it had were a text adventure game called “CIA” and Wheel of Fortune. The real magic for me, though, was in the BASIC interpreter. It was amazing to type in some commands and see this big huge loud complex machine do what I tell it! This is what hooked me on programming and is why I chose the field I did.

The next computer we had was a Canon StarWriter Pro 5000. I’m not sure what hardware it has – and it’s also in my closet, so a careful tear down may be a future article! – but I know it ran GEOS. I loved to write little comedy skits and song lyrics as a child, and it was cool to have all of them on a single 3.5″ floppy disk instead of taking all the paper in the house.

The real life changing moment, however, came on February 22, 1997. It was the day we brought home The Pentium. What a beast of a computer: 133 MHz, 24 MB RAM, and an 8 speed CD drive! It was a Compaq Presario 4712, and it came with Encarta 97, Compton’s Interactive Encyclopaedia, The Yukon Trail, Magic Carpet, PGA Tour ’96, but most of all: 15 free hours of America Online.

AOL was amazing to a second grader. They had Nickelodeon online! You could download little sound clips from Nick and Nick at Nite shows. They had games like Slingo (still one of my all-time favourite takes on slot machines, 20+ years later). And they had a graphical portal to Gopher/WAIS. The local school district had uploaded text files full of fun activities for us children on their Gopher server.

That computer was also where I first used Telnet to a computer running Solaris. A few friends and I used talk on it to have our own small chat rooms. My aunt ran an IRC channel and we talked on mIRC. We ended up with a webcam and talked with family using NetMeeting. Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, Infoseek… so many things.

Programming and desires

Enough with the ‘net reminiscing, at least for now 🙂

Something else important to mention is that my grandpa also was an Important Person at a facility, and one of the things he did was computer purchasing. He had catalogues from Compaq, IBM, and various other vendors in his house for that reason. I loved flipping through them and looking at all the cool stuff.

Something I always wanted back then was my own server. It seemed so cool. I was especially attracted to the ProLiants and AlphaServers in the Compaq catalogue. Windows NT and Tru64 looked so cool when I looked them up online.

The other thing that was very attractive back then were the Power Macintosh computers. My Mum was a digital artist back then. The Quadra was a nice system but didn’t compare to what I saw the Power Macs could do!

For my birthday in 1998, I received Visual Basic as a gift. It really cemented my desire to be a programmer. This was such an exciting time and part of the VB6 software was a one year subscription to the MSDN Library. From that library I learned about all the different servers one could run, all the different types of NT, the different programming languages of Visual Studio…

And now, in the present

In the past few years, as I am able and as opportunities arise, I have amassed quite a collection of hardware that I want to set up and enjoy:

A Compaq Armada e500 laptop. This is a Pentium III from the year 2000 and is likely the newest system I want to have in my Retro Lab. It runs Adélie right now; I’ll likely remove the hard drive and install another to run period-accurate software. I will likely run Windows NT 4 or 2000.

A beige Power Macintosh G3 with the Bordeaux personality card. I will be inserting a 10 GB disk and installing Mac OS 8.6 on it. This will run all the classic Mac software that I have collected over the years. It will be one of the main focuses of the Lab.

A few AlphaServers. Most are earmarked for Adélie so I can’t really use them in the Lab, but there is a single DS10L that was set aside for my personal use. I’ll likely install NT 4 on this one, but I need to investigate further on the hardware.

A Sun Ultra 60, Netra T1, and Ultra 10. These are all from ’98-’99 and will make great Solaris systems, to relive the glory days and experiment more with what was my first real Unix. I would like to run CDE again and possibly do some Java tinkering with these. It would be very fun to run a Retro Lab network off of the AlphaServer and Netra.

A Power Macintosh 7100/80AV. More fun Mac stuff awaits on this computer, though I’m not sure exactly what I will do with it yet.

A Compaq LTE 5150. This is actually my original laptop from high school, ca. 2004. I’d like restore it to its former glory and use it for Windows 3.1 and early 95 software. It can also run OS/2. The screen probably won’t do well for most games, but I do have the docking bay to connect it to an external monitor…

An SGI Indy. This will need an SCSI2SD adaptor to reach its full potential since the hard disk died many years ago. I would love to dual boot IRIX and a BSD.

A Dell System 316LT. There are a few older DOS games I have that would run much better under a CPU of this speed. It needs some love; I seem to recall it had an issue booting up the last time I had it out. I could also try and run GEOS.

A Compaq Presario 4850. This is, to my knowledge, the oldest original computer I have that still fully functions. We purchased it on my Mum’s birthday, 1998, for her graphic design software. This, along with the Beige G3, will likely be the centrepiece of my Lab. I plan on running either Windows 95 or 98 on it, and also various other OSes of the era: BeOS, OpenStep, maybe early Linux. I know that the Rage Pro functions in high res in Win3.1 and OS/2 from prior hackings. It’s also the first computer I used to tinkered with XFree86 modelines. It has a factory original Hitachi DVD drive.

Don’t forget the accessories!

Oh yes, I have some great period hardware for the tinkering as well:

HP ScanJet 5s SCSI scanner. Drivers for Windows, Macintosh, and IRIX, at least. I believe there is an attachment to scan photo negatives as well, but I can’t remember now.

Aiptek webcam. Yes, the original one from the NetMeetings of old that I talked about in my history section. Should be very easy to bring up under Windows. I am curious about Macintosh support.

HP CD Writer Plus 7200e. This is a parallel port, dual-speed CD writer and rewriter. One of the cool features I found on this back in the day is that if you send multimedia commands and have speakers connected to the external headphone jack, you can power off the computer and still listen to the CD until it finishes! I found this out one day when Win95 crashed while I was listening to Garbage’s Version 2.0.

My MSDN Universal archive. In 2002 I found an MSDN Universal subscription at a flea market for 15 USD. I activated it and have all the CDs, and also sent a special request for them to send me the Archive CDs which included BackOffice 4.5 and a few other goodies.

Unfortunately my back and neck are not up to carrying a CRT. I have a flat panel from 2006, a 17″ ViewSonic, that seems to be very close in specification to what we could have had in 1998 for way too much money 😉 Hey, with everything else being so accurate, a little cheating on the monitor isn’t so bad!

In conclusion

This was a lot longer than I had originally anticipated, but it also covers a lot of ground. Over the coming weeks, I hope to bring up a few of these computers and document the processes. Until then, happy hacking!

Libre software and moral absolutism

I’ve been pondering what to write in my blog now that I no longer lead Adélie Linux. There isn’t a great amount of things to write about around my day job making libre networking software, and there’s even less to write about my “spare time” projects. (Mostly because that spare time is spent playing with my cat, my Mum, or my video games.)

I had originally planned for this blog to cover travel and photography around Oklahoma in addition to tech. For obvious reasons, this isn’t something I’m able to do at this time. There are only so many ways I can photograph the gardens around my flat, and inter-city (let alone inter-state) travel is not exactly possible in 2020.

There are actually a lot of tech subjects I would love to cover, but a lot of them revolve around non-libre software. After spending so many years in the communities I have, there seemed a very real sense of shame in the thought of writing about it. However, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realise it is not shame I feel.

It is embarrassment. It is a sense of letting my friends and colleagues down by feeling anything other than contempt for running proprietary software.

But I do. I absolutely enjoy using my iPad Air 2. And I have dozens – maybe hundreds – of articles in me about retro computing with classic versions of Windows, Mac OS, and Solaris. Game consoles are another fun hobby of mine that I want to share more widely.

So this is the dilemma I face. To continue to write nothing but articles about Linux would be to hide a part of me that is real. Is that what I want from my life? I don’t think it is.

This is not a rebuke of libre software, nor is this some admission there is nothing left to write about it. The future will always be bright with libre software, and I have plenty of articles left in me with regards to libre software, I’m sure. But I think it’s about time for me to admit to myself, and the world, that I have other technological passions as well. And it’s time to stop being embarrassed about it.

Leaving the Linux distribution community

It is with a heavy heart that I am publicly announcing my immediate retirement from the Linux distribution community. This is not a decision I have arrived at lightly.

This year has been challenging for every living being on planet Earth. For me personally, 2020 has given me a lion’s share of financial challenges. I am financially hurting in ways that I could have never imagined.

Adélie Linux and its community has always been a passion of mine, and that passion is still intact. However, it is not responsible for me to continue to act as Project Lead when I need to focus on things that will make me enough money to survive.

Without the ability to be paid to work on Adélie Linux, there is not enough time in my day to devote to it and give it the attention and care that it so rightfully deserves. It is not fair to the community to have to wait weeks (or longer) for me to review merge requests, fix bugs, respond to issues, and so on.

My heart and soul will always belong to Adélie and the wonderful community we have built together over the past six years.

I will stay around long enough to properly transfer my Lead role to someone else, who can carry Adélie to great things in the future. However, I will not be contributing much in the way of patches or code to upstreams like musl or KDE going forward.

It is my sincere hope that when I am in a better financial situation, I can resume leadership of Adélie Linux, if the community should so desire. I cannot see the future and do not know when, or if, that could happen.

Until then, I wish all of you the very best and look forward to watching Adélie Linux continue to grow, from a distance.

With much respect,

–arw

Cascading failures (or, why I did nothing this weekend)

This is a fun one.

To set the scene and provide information in temporal order, my Talos and WD Black NVMe device have never “gotten along” well. Frequently, the device would fail to train for whatever reason. Calling reboot from a Petitboot shell with fast-reset enabled was enough to fix this, so I didn’t think all that much about it.

Late in the night Thursday (or early in the morning Friday, if you prefer), I was reading a few articles before I went to bed. At 01:36:13, an animal darted in front of a car about two miles away, causing the car to crash into a power pole. This caused a serious power surge as the lines came down on to each other (and the car’s frame).

My office is was protected by an APC BX1500G combination battery backup (SPS, not UPS) and surge protection unit. The power surge was severe enough that the unit failed. The lights, the Power Mac G5, and the Talos in my office went immediately dark as the alarm went off making a continuous noise while “F04” and “See Manual” flashed on the display. This code means “Clamp Short”, and means that the varistor that is supposed to arrest surges had become permanently ‘stuck’ in arrest mode.

My first priority was to ensure the integrity of my hardware, so I dug out a spare APC SPS and put the battery from the now-failed one in it. I powered on my Talos and while it seemed to IPL fine, lspci in Petitboot did not show my NVMe device as present. Looking in Hostboot, it now wasn’t even failing to train — the slot may as well have been unoccupied. I tried both a fast-reset and a full system power cycle to no avail.

The next day, I attempted to swap slots, thinking the PCIe slot that the NVMe device was connected to may have been damaged by the power surge. I swapped the NVMe and the sound card. The sound card worked in the slot formerly occupied by the NVMe, but the NVMe still wouldn’t come up in the slot formerly occupied by the sound card. Now came the worrying part: did the M.2 to PCIe adaptor fail, or did the NVMe media itself fail?

I went to two of our local computer stores to buy some parts. I decided that since I was already going to need to do a full disk swap (even if I could recover the data off the NVMe media), it would make sense to add SATA media as well. I had a 256 GB SATA SSD laying around that was supposed to be put in my Xeon until it failed. I found an “open box” Seagate 1 TB HDD for 30 USD at DISC Surplus Computers in Sand Springs. And I found a new 4-port Marvell chipset based SATA controller for 34 USD at Wholesale Computer Supply in Tulsa. I also had a 3 port USB 3.0 controller card sitting on a shelf since the slot it was meant to go in was occupied by a 2-slot Radeon that was used for big endian amdgpu.ko porting. I went ahead and shelved that Radeon (and the big endian porting effort, for now) and used the CPU 1 slot for SATA and the CPU 2 slot for the USB card.

I then turned my attention to recovering the NVMe media. I brought out my old Intel Reference Platform board, a DP43TF with developer firmware, and put the NVMe adaptor card with media in to it. Unfortunately, the DP43TF only has one PCIe slot larger than x1, and it’s the x16 typically used for a GPU. Since NVMe is x4, I had to find a PCI GPU. I pulled a GeForce 8400GS out of one of our Pentium 4 test boxes and attempted to boot the Adélie 1.0-BETA4 live CD.

Our Live CD does not support the JMicron PATA controller that the DP43TF’s DVD drive was connected to. I ended up using a USB optical media, but I also could have used SATA optical media. The CD I was attempting to use was scratched, and it refused to finish booting (the scratched section appears to have contained OpenRC). I had to find a computer capable of burning media, which was no small task since most newer computers don’t support writing optical media and most of my computers have marginal USB support at best.

One of our community members reminded me that the PowerBook G4 has a SuperDrive, which I used to burn a fresh x86_64 BETA4 CD. Finally booted, I noticed the NVMe was present but throwing occasional controller reset errors. I’m not sure if this was due to media degradation or the fact it was a Gen3 NVMe in a Gen1 PCIe slot. At any rate, I used dd to make a full clone of the NVMe to the 1 TB Seagate disk, and then put that in the Talos. A gracious member of the Adélie Linux community donated the funds needed to replace the NVMe with a Samsung 970 EVO Pro of the same size.

Yesterday I copied the data off the Seagate 1 TB to the new Samsung NVMe. Everything is working quite well, and the Samsung is much faster than the Western Digital; 712 MB/s uncached write vs 303 MB/s on the WD. The additional space on the Seagate can be used for further testing, and for possible expansion of Adélie to more platforms — I may post more on that later. 🙂

This was a very interesting experience for me. It’s been many years since I’ve seen a cascade of failures like this: car accident breaks APC SPS, which breaks NVMe marginally, which shows an issue booting our live CD on a specific computer. It also gave me a reason to re-catalogue a lot of the hardware I have on hand for testing purposes, and to know what needs fixing and replacing. And most importantly, it made me realise I need to perform weekly backups instead of semi-annual backups.

I want to especially thank the members of the Adélie Linux community that helped with this process, not only financially but with techniques and ideas to make this go well. My workstation is better than ever, and now I can get even more done for libre software. You rock!