On devils and bentos

That's a bit more of a colourful title than "On BSDs and Thinkpads", right?

There has been a little bit of discussion in Gopherspace lately on these two

topics and I wanted to throw in my two cents. Well, probably more like twenty

cents knowing my limited ability for parsimony.

I am a long time *BSD fan, and NetBSD is my flavour of choice, although I also

have a deep fondness and tremendous respect for OpenBSD. At one point in my

life, long ago, when I had the time and energy for such nonsense, I really

agonised over my choice of operating system, believing it to be some deep

reflection of my inner character (I'm freely admitting to this embarrassing past

only because I strongly suspect that at least half the people reading it this

will not be able to point fingers, having been there themselves). At that point

I could have, on demand, launched into a very detailed explanation of why I

chose Net over Open, citing feature lists and benchmarks and support for third

party software and bla, bla, bla. All of these details are lost to time, but I

do remember that I could only ever make a pretty slight argument for one over

the other.

Eventually some pragmatic requirement (again now lost in time) forced me to

start using Linux as my daily desktop instead of NetBSD, but I continued to use

NetBSD for my personal servers, and still do up to this day. It has been an

incredibly reliable, hassle free system for me. The rate of change regarding

major features is incredibly slow, which suits me just fine. I don't like

change for the sake of change, or being forced to learn new stuff every few

years even when the old stuff worked fine for me. If it ain't broke, don't fix

it. NetBSD gets this, and I mostly do stuff just like I did 10 years ago.

Because my NetBSD servers just happily keep on running with very minimal care

for years on end, I actually feel a little bit out of touch with the OS,

compared to when I used it daily for everything. I am dimly aware of

interesting new stuff happening (a Lua interpreter in the kernel - not yet sure

how I feel about this - and also this "rumpkernel" concept), but I have probably

forgotten a lot too. I might try to correct this soon. I have a currently

unused Raspberry Pi 1 sitting around. After reading Pet84rik's posts about

OpenBSD, I thought perhaps I should put OpenBSD on it and explore the road that

I so very almost went down instead. But it turns out that, actually, not many

OSes support the Raspberry Pi 1, so OpenBSD is not possible, and neither is

Minix 3. But, like they say, "Of course it runs NetBSD!", so I guess I'll set

that up some time and play around. Heck, maybe I'll run a gopher server on it,

why not?

I like old Thinkpads, but honestly, who doesn't? It's a bit of a cliche,

really. But I am onboard with the standard arguments: they have very nice

keyboards, the build quality is high and perhaps most of all I appreciate the

fact that they are designed for easy servicability, and that there is a wide

range of replacement parts available on eBay to facilitate this. I am

especially enamoured of the ultraportable X series. I like small and light

laptops, and unlike a lot of geeks I really have no lust for huge, high

resolution displays.

Right now my "daily driver" when I am at home is a refurbished Thinkpad X220

which I bought just before I moved to Finland. It has 8GB of RAM, a 1 TB

spinning disk that I keep my stuff on and a 32 GB SSD drive that has the OS

(Debian Stable) and swap space on it. I regret the drive setup a little: I

was trying to be frugal and it largely bit me in the ass. I was unaware at

the time that SSD speed is quite strongly dependent upon size, and the very

small ones are scarcely worth it. This one does read faster than a

spinner (I think I measured it at roughly twice the speed), but writes are

actually about the same speed. Still, for a system disk this is not critical.

And the 1TB spinner was discounted as some kind of vague refurb. It was

described as "removed from a new laptop" and came with a one year warranty, so I

figured it probably wasn't going to be a lemon. And it works just fine, but it

occasionally makes the kind of sounds you don't want a drive to make, so I worry

about it's long term prospects.

I hope to be able to flash Coreboot or (if they get X220 support) Libreboot to

the BIOS sometime this year.

Previously I used an X60s, again a refurb. It was quite a nice machine, but I

actually didn't have a lot of luck with it. The internal WiFi card was quite

flakey (easily remedied with a cheap USB replacement), but the screen also

developed some sort of weird defect which manifested as two vertical lines of

garbled, mostly black pixels, extending upward from the bottom of the screen.

They grew over time. It was definitely not a software issue or issue with the

graphics card, these lines were visible even when the machine was powered off,

it was something to do with the physical LCD panel itself. Very strange, as it

was not subject to any kind of trauma. I always meant to post photos somewhere

and see if somebody knew what was up. Anyway, having bought the X220 I decided

it was time to part with this machine. I tried very hard to find it a good

home, listing it for weeks at ludicrous prices (in the end a mere NZ$1, I

think) on the local auction site. So in the end, with my move looming, I

relisted individual parts, sold the RAM sticks, hard drive, hard drive caddy and

power adapter and was forced to recycle the rest. This is a shame and a waste,

but I honestly did everything I could.