topgrade

That’s how you learn to use it better!

alias up='topgrade'

E-waste Thinkpads are quickly becoming my favorite laptops.

I recently picked up a couple of e-waste laptops, Thinkpad x130e’s with an AMD E-300, 4GB RAM and a 320GB spinner. For the pair I paid $60 shipped. These were low-end semi-ruggedized laptops meant for students released around the time that HBO started showing Game of Thrones.

I’ve put Debian on one and it runs great. All the hardware just works, everything is pretty quick after boot, and I love how rugged and portable it is. Email, writing, basic productivity, hobby development and 2D gaming all work great. Web browsing takes a hit if I open too many tabs, the video card is too underpowered for most 3D games that came out after 2010, and large compiles are slow. I’m a bit worried about the aging HDD so I’m going to replace it with a cheap SSD which should help with boot and compile times.

The other one I’m not sure about. I’ve tried HaikuOS and the video and wifi work well and the whole system feels very snappy, but there’s no audio or webcam support. Redox seems interesting but needs a whole lot more hardware support. I’ll probably just end up cloning the first one unless I can get a better suggestion.

All that is to say, Linux is great on old cheap hardware.

Watch out for sharks!

Ok, there seems to be a lot of confusion here about what POSIX is.

A long time ago, there were a lot of systems by various companies and groups that all claimed to be Unix, or at least Unix compatible. But, since there wasn’t a standardized definition of Unix, they weren’t all compatible with each other. The US government and other groups decided this was a problem and asked the IEEE to come up with a standard that the vendors could certify to. This standard is named POSIX and is composed of low level OS APIs, C language support, shells, utilities and a bunch of other components.

This meant that anything that targets POSIX should run on any POSIX system with nothing more than at most a recompile. There was a time, basically until the early ‘00s, that every major OS targeted being able to be certified POSIX in some way. This was great!

However, since Linux has won the Unix wars, with MacOS in a technical second place, the importance of POSIX has mostly gone away. It is still an important spec. Linux, MacOS and even Windows more or less maintain compatibility with it, but there isn’t a push for certification the way there once was. If it runs on a couple Linux distros and MacOS, that’s probably good enough.

EDIT: The jokes that you might see having to do with POSIX generally are about the fact that MacOS is certified POSIX compliant, but nobody really cares, while Linux has never been certified POSIX compliant but is the de facto standard UNIX and therefore the most common POSIX target.