A little update on my Pentium 1 project!

I’ve equipped it with a few useful CLI tools, for example Midnight Commander as a file manager and Newsraft as an RSS reader!

I’ve realized that you could theoretically still be productive on a machine this old (I’m not!!! xD) if you’re willing (NO!) to make a few compromises (OMG NO xD). You can browse the internet (if you don’t care about images, CSS, JS, basically 99.9% of the modern web), write emails, chat, read news feeds, program using GCC, write a PhD thesis in Markdown using vi and then use Pandoc to create the most beautiful PDF in the world xD

Things got interesting with the NetBSD packages: Some of them were built with compiler flags for newer CPU architectures, which means the ABI isn’t compatible with the Pentium 1. For example FLTK, a lightweight GUI library that is used by programs such as Dillo and Newsbeuter.

The prebuilt libfltk.so.2.0.0 doesn’t run on the Pentium 1 because it was built for a newer CPU architecture. So I got the FLTK source and tried to build it myself with appropriate compiler flags.

Then bmake wanted to build a specific GCC version as a dependency and suddenly I was compiling my own GCC from source... which was the point where I gave up!

With pkg_add I also ran into the problem that some packages can’t be installed when they expect different versions of the same dependency, for example different versions of curl.

#RetroComputing #RetroPC #Pentium1 #NetBSD #BSD #i386 #CLI #Terminal #CommandLine #MidnightCommander #Newsraft #FLTK #GCC #OpenSource #FOSS #FreeSoftware #VintageComputing #OldComputers #ComputerHistory #Unix #RetroTechnology #RetroHardware