12 february 2019
Dell Latitude D600 (2003)
I bought this laptop a while back for $20 on ebay. It came with a dead battery, and without an AC adapter. I got a new one (non-Dell) for $7.99, when I got it I realized the barrel plug was the same 5.5mm used on the current Latitude range (I have a Latitude 7480 for work.)
After I got power to the machine I booted into a fresh Windows XP SP2 install. Well the updates didn't stop after SP2, so there were a few issues:
- WiFi - this machine was a 1st gen Centrino laptop so it has an internal 802.11g adapter. However WinXP wasn't recognizing any networks with WPA2. Needed an update to support WPA2.
- To get one, I plugged in the ethernet to find a desolate landscape laid bare by the TLS apocalypse. Ran into this with my PowerBook G4 of the same vintage. As I recalled, though:
- Firefox, hosted on SourceForge, needs TLS 1.2,
So I cheated and used my PC to load up Firefox installer for the last XP supported version. But using this 1.3 gHZ 512MB machine on the graphic internet sucked big time. Plus to get it up to the last XP version required more updates, which of course Windows Update doesn't work anymore. I find out where to get the collected installer binaries, and a little script thingy to install them. Only 65 separate binary installers and 65 reboots to get to a similar place as my Mac OS X Leopard PowerBook G4, with the bonus of a mostly-still-supported ISA and the major drawback of Windows XP.
Faced with this I decided to wipe the 60 GB hard drive and install a fresh, recently released operating system, FreeBSD 12.0. This promised to be just as much or if not more of a pain but at the end of it I'd be running a current operating system and have all the tools needed to actually connect to the internet securely.
First step was getting some install media prepped. Owing to the vintage of the laptop, USB boot was out, optical drive only. Okay, not a problem, for some reason the CVS on the corner still stocks CD-Rs. I go to the repositories for an install CD image and it turns out the x86_32 install .iso clocks in at a healthy 784MB, or around 84MB too big for a regular CD-R. Not to worry, FreeBSD is tracking the issue that the cd image is actually too large for a CD. That does however have me looking at a network install, something I didn't really ever do back in my Linux installing days (2008-2010ish, when a big distro easily fit on a CD).
The network install image successfully burned, and I picked a keyboard layout, selected the default partitioning scheme, only for the network to not find the repos from within the installer. I went into the live CD command line, netstat was connected, the autoconfig of ethernet worked fine. Culprit was my router not letting FTP through. After taking care of that everything worked, easy as Ubuntu. Not the X11 part though, which isn't covered by the basic network install (and why would it be since this build is for servers?). Xfce4 had a nice package ready to go in the ports tree and pretty soon I was looking at a graphical desktop that's period appropriate for the hardware and lightweight enough to feel like a decent computer. (as long as I stayed away from Firefox.) After downloading IBM Plex Mono and a couple of essential color schemes for the Xfce terminal emulator, I've finally got a UNIX system to call my own. It's a nice counterpart to my other 2003 vintage machine.
I might pick up an IBM Thinkpad T40 to round out the collection...
(one thing I forgot to mention that I thought was cool about FreeBSD is that it connects to wifi during boot, and I checked a box to sync the system clock to NTP during boot to compensate for a dead CMOS battery. Try that with Windows XP!)