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    / /  __/ /_(__  )  __/ /_/ /  / /_/ / /  / /  
 __/ /\___/\__/____/\___/\__/_/   \__,_/_/  /_/   
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Retro computer shenanigans: Raspberry Pi 4 file server, and running Linux

(Originally posted to Cohost on Tue, Jul 9, 2024, 9:00 PM)

Raspberry Pi 4

Screenshot of a Windows XP desktop with the classic, brutalist theme. The left window is a Wikipedia page about the Dreamcast game "Rainbow Cotton". The right window is the Philosophy page of the Hundred Rabbits' website.

I connected a Pi 4 (running Alpine Linux) to my laptop, Omoikane, via a local-only LAN. For security reasons the laptop is not connected to the public internet, only the Pi 4 and any server it hosts.

On the first image, the window on the left is a Wikipedia article hosted on a Kiwix server. The right is Hundred Rabbits' website, saved offline with wget and accessed from a Samba file server.

There's a couple reasons why I wanted to do this:

Transferring data from the laptop to other computers was tedious with a USB, and since I wanted to use Omoikane for learning and taking notes, but I'm not always in front of it, there's high latency for walking to the laptop, turning it on, typing my notes, and transferring them. I set up a Samba file server with a shared user and directory (though I needed this answer), and a Syncthing service for my notes to sync on other computers.

This also means I can transfer books and programs to the laptop through the network.

Kiwix doesn't work on the laptop. They have a Windows XP build but it looks like a JavaScript client and afaik requires SSE2. The last Kiwix build likely supported by the laptop was hard to find and isn't compatible with newer Kiwix files. However, connecting to a server hosted by kiwix-tools is fine, and it even has a NoJS endpoint for lighter browsers.

Linux on Omoikane

A photo taken of a laptop running Slackware Linux 13.37 with the i3 window manager. The screen has a terminal open, printing the "neofetch" results of this computer. The desktop background is a wallpaper of Ruri Hoshino in a cat costume.

Windows XP is fine for everyday tasks, but I'm used to the comfort of Linux. Contrary to popular belief though, you can't just slap a modern Linux distribution on a 20-year-old computer and call it a day.

There's a few problems that got in my way:

The driver for my S3 ProSavage8 GPU fails to load, or is insufficient
- I noticed this in all the modern OSes I could boot: Slackware 14.1, Slackware 14.2, and NetBSD 10.0 all had choppy, sluggish windows and occasional graphical glitches. The worst case was OpenBSD 7.5 with garbled terminal graphics after starting X11.
  - In Linux, specifying fbdev or vesa in xorg.conf was an improvement over whatever it used by default, esp. with rendering icons in Window Maker, but it still hogged the CPU and, in vesa's case, had this "flashbang LCD bleed" effect every time the graphical desktop started or stopped
- I learned Mesa killed support for S3 Savage GPUs back in 2011, beginning with 8.0 according to this Reddit thread and its changelog
  - According to DistroWatch, some notable versions before the removal of S3 support were Debian 6.0, Slackware 13.37, NetBSD 6.1.5, and OpenBSD 5.4. Of course I can run some newer OSes, but the lack of graphical acceleration is a turn-off
There is only 256 MiB of usable RAM in the laptop, which means most modern distros won't boot or install (incl. more exotic OSes like Haiku)
- 8 MiB to 32 MiB can be taken up by the GPU depending on my BIOS configuration, making it even less
The laptop can only boot from CD-R, not DVD-Rs or USB. This means you'll have to burn a PLOP Boot Manager disc and plug in a USB if, despite the previous problems, you still want to run a modern operating system that can't fit on a CD
The CPU lacks SSE2 instructions. It's not that big of a deal, but if you use Windows XP you may not be able to run the "latest" supported applications. Similarly, when testing Alpine in a VM without SSE2 instructions, I got an "illegal instruction" error when trying to run the text editor micro.

I settled on Slackware 13.37 (2011) after much trial and error, and specifically because Slackware doesn't require much internet access.

And guess what? It works great!

The default install comes with almost every package I need (e-book reader, Pomodoro timer, etc), and the ones it doesn't include can be found as SlackBuilds and transferred to the laptop. Though there are a lot of dead links, it's nothing the Wayback Machine, Googling filenames, and using md5 checksums can't work around.

Some packages I were able to run on Slackware 13.37 were:

Anki 1.2.9 (SlackBuilds) for flashcards with spaced repetition
Anki 2.0.33 (using Slackware 14.1's SlackBuild with the 13.37 dependencies) for a newer version
DOSBOX 0.74 (SlackBuilds) for running DOS programs
feh 2.3 (SlackBuilds) for a desktop background on minimal WMs
i3 4.2 (SlackBuilds) for a tiling window manager
neofetch (from source) for looking cool
Redshift 1.2 (SlackBuilds) for a red light filter
sshfs-fuse 2.4 (SlackBuilds) for file sharing with my Pi 4
VICE 2.1 (SlackBuilds) for running C64 programs
Vim 9.1.544 (from source)

As usual, fellow blogger @nortti (who originally owned the laptop, giving it the name ~~"Touko"~~ "touko") has been a huge help, and shared the idea of compiling a modern kernel on Slackware 13.37 so I can use zram (compressed swap in RAM) and modern btrfs. I was considering compiling the latest gcc so I can compile Raylib for game development, and use earlyoom to keep the system from freezing when OOM.