Return of my A30

[Adda]

So a while ago the UXGA display in my lovely old A30 died, so it has had a 14.1" XGA display mounted since.
But recently I bought a Sony G420 trinitron monitor and it brought back a lot of memories from a time when computers where really good.
Naturally, my eyes drifted to the good ol' A30 sitting there on the shelf, doing nothing, with it's awesome 1.2GHz Tualatin and CL2 RAM.
Instant love, all over again, so I just ordered a brand new UXGA IPS display for it (assuming I get what I ordered) and it's on it's way.
I can't wait to get my A30 up and running again, I doubt there are many of these left that still work, but mine has a very late generation motherboard (made 2003), and it just keeps going on and on and on, it's just too good to be true.
I even played WoW on it a LOT at one time, but it's still going no weakness.

So while waiting I have been getting my X20 up and running, Lubuntu so far, works fine, no flash, slow browsing, but usable.
I'm writing on it as I write this.

But yeah, I have thinned out my collection of ThinkPads, and now it's time to make the ones I have left, that are not part donors, ready for action.

What do you think, Lubuntu or Puppy for the A30?
I like Lubuntu, but after my tweaks it still uses ~90MB RAM (on the X20 with 320MB total), I'd like to bring it doen to around 50MB (after cold boot), would Puppy help me do that?

[ajkula66]

I hope that you get your A30 ("p" - given the UXGA LCD?) back up. These were the original FlexViews that had the world stunned.

My basement is full of parts for A3x series and if you need anything apart from planar/LCD, just ask. Yours for the price of shipping.

As for the *nix distro...I happen to like CentOS and it runs exceptionally well on my A31p. How it would play with a P3M and 1GB of RAM I really can't say, but it's worth a shot, at least IMO.

Good luck.

[Adda]

I don't think I'll need anything, but thanks for the offer, I'll let you know if I do.
Some of the plastics are quite worn, I have taken my A30 apart a billion times.

It is just an A30 though, my old planar only has the 16MB Radeon Mobility.
I did order an A30p mobo once, but it didn't last long, I'll stick with my trusty old 16MB mobo for now.

I only have 512MB RAM in it, as I don't want to abaondon the CL2 RAM, they are awesome memory sticks, and on Linux it shouldn't be much a probem anyway.
I made an older version of Linux Mint LXDE consume a mare 50MB of RAM once, leaving plenty of room for Audacious and a web browser.

I fired up my A30 last night, I used it to load a distro on to a IDE HDD for the X20, worked just fine, ran cool too (has an A31 HSF installed), what a champ!

[brchan]

I have not tried CentOS, but I highly recommend wary puppy linux. It has excellent built-in hardware support, very fast performance, and is built for older hardware. I am using it on my 600X. Wary also has non-bloated office writer, pdf viewer, and mplayer video player to just name a few.

After booting to the desktop, my system uses ~27mb ram. I would also recommend installing Dillo web browser and the GTK-youtube-viewer youtube client (I am actually able to watch lag-free fullscreen 240p video with ~25% cpu usage!). I almost never go over 60mb with dillo open with multiple tabs, a few terminals, and youtube-viewer playing.

[Adda]

Excellent, I'll try that!

[Adda]

I'm speechless, it works perfectly well, time for tweaks.

[Adda]

WHAT? Pale Moon isn't supported on Pentium III processors? that browser is getting seriously picky with what I agrees to run on...

[Adda]

Ok, so Puppy is good for my X20, probably also my 570, but I'm used to more from my A30.
I tried XP, runs fine, works well, but antivirus software slows it down.

At the moment I'm installing Linux Mint xfce in it to see what happens.

[ajkula66]

Try Peppermint...you may love it or you may hate it, but it's worth a shot IMO.

[Adda]

AAAAAAh, Peppermint you say?

I just installed Lubuntu (Linux Mint xfce = bloat) on my A30, I like Ubuntu (sort of) and love LXDE, so Lubuntu or Peppermint is probably where I'll end up.
I do feel like Lubuntu is a wee bit "bloated" yeah I know funny word for such an OS, but memory usage is higher then I'd expect.

Will try Peppermint as soon as I feel like installing another OS.

[ajkula66]

Will try Peppermint as soon as I feel like installing another OS.

Try it from a "live" CD/USB...just to get a flavour of it. It is a bit different from other "light" distros IMO, which may be good or bad...depending on one's taste/needs...

[Adda]

I have run in to a serious problem.

When setting my monitor to UXGA (on Lubuntu), 2D becomes slow in some ways, fx. moving around windows is PAINFULLY slow, at XGA there is no problem.
I have installed the latest xorg packages from the edgers repository, it didn't help, the problem is probably caused by low vram.

It's usually like this with Linux, loads of good stuff becomes pointless due to some sort of problem that Windows doesn't have.

[brchan]

You can try using a lighter window manager than xfce. openbox, or JWM (optimal, though a bit ugly), would be much less taxing on resources.

There is a comparison of memory usage of different desktop environments and WMs here: https://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/ ... -desktops/

Also note that newer linux distros may have new video packages that have dropped acceleration support for very old gpus.

[Adda]

At XGA the window manager (openbox) is fast and responsive, I only use 100 out of 512MB of ram and the CPU is not overly taxed.
As soon as I increase the resolution to UXGA, the window manager becomes very slow.

Glxinfo says I have direct rendering, glxgears works, but only displays 16fps.

Displaying UXGA at 24bit color only consumes 8MB vram though, I wonder what's going on.

Is there a distro, for old systems, that actually use the best versions of xorg, for old hardware, rather then say they work well on old systems, but use new packages, that are terrible?

Ubuntu versions from 2008-9 worked perfectly well, but since they went away from using xorg.conf, it's all one big mess, I can't even find a way to use 16 bit color.
If I make an xorg.conf file, then X won't start.

[brchan]

Did wary puppy work properly? Try crunchbang linux. The xorg drivers worked much better on my T23 than newer ones like on arch linux.

[Adda]

Puppy did work, but I strongly disagree with the user interface, it's just one big random mess.

I'll look in to crunchbang and try out Peppermint.

I think the problem has something to do with the new way graphics work in linux (Ubuntu at least), I remember that they made some changes a while ago, that enabled complex graphics before the system had booted in to X, my A30 did not like that at all, not one bit.

[Adda]

AHA Peppermint does not seem the have this problem, even though windows turn transparent when I move them, UXGA no problem.

I'll try and install it and see if this is just a glitch

Edit: on second thought, I see pulseaudio, so I'll take a look at Crunchbang first.

Edit2: Crunchbang seems very very interesting, I love the installer, very keyboard enabled, too bad is has puleaudio too, pure ALSA is better.
Crunchbang doesn't have problems at high resolutions either, I wonder if it was something I did to Lubuntu that caused it.
No matter though, it's good to expand my horizons, and it feels strangely comforting to move away from the Ubuntu universe.

[Adda]

I think I figured it out, on Lubuntu, the mouse cursor movement seems to be smoothed, this means that when I move windows around, the video card has to render the window more times then it normally would, and that causes the problem, I think or guess.

[Adda]

Alright, CrunchBang has gotten basic functionality, meaning, trackpoint sensitivity (no accel, high sens) and scrolling has been configured.
I also made it understand that my G420 wants to run 1600x1200@85Hz, and that it should set that resolution at every boot.

Next up, fan control!

[Adda]

OK, the A30 is up and running.

My only complaints are that now I have to get used to a new user interface, it's a decent one though.
Also, scrolling webpages is slow, and sometimes, for no reason at all, programs just close.
And lastly, whenever I reboot, and this applies to all distros I have tried so far, the video card craps out, looks like CGA graphics, untill video drivers are loaded, even the IBM logo is messed up, more reboots = fewer available colors, after a bunch of reboots, it can only display red it seems.
If I reboot too many times, linux craps out, seems to be a problem with IRQ's, not sure though.

Not that I'll have to reboot often from now on, so it won't be much of a problem.

I love typing on this thing, why did the T50 mobo fit T4x series machines, the A30's are much better.
What about making a mobo for desktop AMD fusion CPU's for the A30's, remove the drive bays, and use the space for a gargantuan cooler, that would be cool.

[brchan]

If programs just close, it could indicate that you were low on ram. Also, try disabling smooth scrolling if you use firefox. I noticed a boost in responsiveness when I did this on my T23. If you are mainly browsing simpler websites, netsurf and dillo browsers will be much much faster than using any full featured browser on a machine this old, and will render the pages almost exactly the same (netsurf will render closest).

[RealBlackStuff]

Read my post about how to reduce RAM in PaleMoon, Firefox and others: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=116497

[Adda]

Ram is not a problem, I use about 80MB on a fresh boot, and haven't seen it go above 350MB of used ram.
The problem I have with the simpler browsers is that they don't support NoScript.

I wish I could use Pale Moon, but it requires SSE2 or higher, so my old P3 won't do, Firefox has become one of the most bloated browsers out there, I hate what they have done, I'm lost without Pale Moon.

I always disable smooth scrolling, I'm too 90's for such fancy stuff, and it doesn't help at all, even if the system is fast enough.

I have tried a few of the light weight browsers, they are a bit faster, but I need NoScript, I don't want to expose my computers to the broken internet.

Yes the internet is broken, it builds on an economy supported by bots that click links, most email traffic is spam, and it's bugged down by stupid scripts that make even a fast computer seem sluggish.

Things used to be so much better.

Anyway, I changed swappiness from 60 to 5, this should help it go above 350MB of used ram, and keep disk activity down.

When running firefox, it uses around 180MB of ram.

[Adda]

I have reached a conclusion.

The Radeon M6-LY is not fast enough for a UXGA display, XGA is fine, but anything above that is not too good.

I'm thinking of upgrading or merging my A30 with an A31/p.

[Adda]

CrunchBang in the X20 is great, faster 2D then the A30 (yeah really!) and overall good, the X20 is ready!

AHA finally I made 16-bit color work, here is how:

In this config file (that I made my self):

Code: Select all

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-video.conf

I put the following:

Code: Select all

Section "Screen"
	Identifier		"Default Screen"
	Monitor		"Configured Monitor"
	Device		"Configured Video Device"
	DefaultDepth	16
EndSection

Works like a charm and makes the X20 quite snappy!

Will try more on the A30 when the display arrives.

Also, I'm using the "Simple" theme as it is quite fast, makes a noticeable difference on such an old machine, even webpage scrolling in Iceweasel is fine now!

[Adda]

First, PICTURE WARNING!!!

Here is a link to a picture of my X20 in the best state it has been in for years.

http://cdn.head-fi.org/c/cf/cfe726a8_AUT_0602.jpeg

It is a X20 model 2662-31G, with Pentium III 600MHz, 320MB ram and 60GB Hitachi 7K100 (these drives never give up do they?), with a Intel 2200BG wireless card and some DIY installed antennae.
Only uses 67MB of ram on a fresh boot with the tweaked CrunchBang Linux.

[Adda]

I received the display, but it is not new as the seller (bumblesale on ebay) claimed, there is yellowing around the edges of the screen and it has obviously been mounted in a laptop before.

[ajkula66]

I received the display, but it is not new as the seller (bumblesale on ebay) claimed, there is yellowing around the edges of the screen and it has obviously been mounted in a laptop before.

I would've been incredibly surprised had you actually received a NOS panel, it's pretty much an equivalent of an unicorn nowadays...

If the screen is any good, ask for a partial refund and keep it. At least that's what I would do.

Good luck.

[Adda]

I received the display, but it is not new as the seller (bumblesale on ebay) claimed, there is yellowing around the edges of the screen and it has obviously been mounted in a laptop before.

I would've been incredibly surprised had you actually received a NOS panel, it's pretty much an equivalent of an unicorn nowadays...

If the screen is any good, ask for a partial refund and keep it. At least that's what I would do.

Good luck.

I was thinking the same thing, the panel is not very good though, gaping bezel allowing dust to enter and a pressure mark.
You have most likely seen the yellowing before, it looks like the panel has been used for a long time by someone who smoked.

First I have to make the seller agree that this panel is actually used, and that these problems (and the sticky tape on the bezel) are not caused by the age of the panel.
There is no reason why a panel of this age, is more or less perfect, if unused or lightly used.

[Adda]

Oh well, I'll request a partial refund, the price of the display should fit a used and untested, but presumed functional, display.

On with the show, I'll try and install CrunchBang on my A30 once more (the other install went to the X20).