Wesley Moore

👨‍💻 Software Developer
🌏 Sunshine Coast, Australia

Hi I’m Wes 👋. I like warm weather and tinkering with computers; ranging from small microcontrollers, up to large servers and the operating systems that run upon them. I’m a Rustacean with a fondness for mechanical keyboards. Read more on the about page →

Recent Posts

Trying to Get Chimera Linux Running on Pentium Class Hardware

Since declaring in my last post that “it was time to return to slightly less frivolous projects for a bit” I instead spent the last week-and-change attempting to make Chimera Linux run on Pentium class 32-bit x86 hardware.

Screenshot of a terminal with the output of fastfetch. It indicates the OS is Chimera Linux i586. It's using 216 MiB of 256MiB of RAM (85%).
I was moderately successful.

This was sparked by a friend linking to the EoL page on the PC Engines website quoting the fact that they were exiting the market:

Despite having used considerable quantities of AMD processors and Intel NICs, we don’t get adequate design support for new projects. In addition, the x86 silicon currently offered is not very appealing for our niche of passively cooled boards. After about 20 years of WRAP, ALIX and APU, it is time for me to move on to different things.

This reminded me that I had two ALIX boards in neat little aluminium cases sitting in the cupboard: an alix2d13 purchased in 2011, and an alix3d2 purchased in 2012. My immediate thought was the alix3d2 would be perfect for hosting my retro website.

Photo of alix3d2 in aluminum case. It's longer than it is wide, kinda like a modem. It has power, Ethernet, and DB-9 serial cables connected.
alix3d2

They are powered by an AMD Geode LX800 CPU clocked at 500Mhz with 256Mb of RAM. The Geode is mostly an i686 class 32-bit x86 CPU. Instead of installing an OS that I know works on them like OpenWRT or NetBSD I have spent the last week and a bit bringing up Chimera Linux on i586 (Pentium).

I wanted to use Chimera Linux because:

  1. I was already hosting my retro site with it.
  2. I had already packaged the Rust binary that serves part of the site. Chimera makes cross-compiling that package super easy, as well as service monitoring with Dinit.
  3. I thought it would be fun to use a modern distro on Pentium class hardware.

The process of bringing up a new platform on Chimera Linux was interesting, but tested me at times. Especially early on when I was getting segfaults in apk, thus preventing anything from working. This post aims to document the steps I took (which may not be optimal) in case it happens to be useful.

Continue Reading →

Building a Website Fit for 1999

Over the last week I’ve had a lot of fun building a little retro-themed website that I’m hosting at home. Inspired by Ruben’s Retro Corner I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and actually started on it in June last year. More recently Joel Humphries shared on The Sizzle forum that he’d built a little site that he was hosting at home on a Raspberry Pi. This reignited my interest in getting my own site up again. For the fun of it I decided to implement it in HTML4 and serve it over plain HTTP so that it would work on old computers.

Screenshot of a Mac OS 8.1 desktop with a IE 4 window open showing Wes' Nonsense Website
The site in IE 4.01 on Mac OS 8.1
Continue Reading →

Making the Web More Readable With Stylus

Stylus is an open-source browser extension for managing and applying “user styles”—custom snippets of CSS—to websites. It allows you to tweak sites you visit to tailor them to your preferences. In this post I list the ways I use Stylus to make my browsing experience nicer.

Continue Reading →

Replicating My Alacritty Appearance in Ghostty

Ghostty by Mitchell Hashimoto is the new hotness in the terminal emulator world. It recently came out of private beta launching publicly as 1.0. It’s similar to other GPU accelerated terminal emulators like Alacritty and Kitty, but differs in that it uses the native toolkit on macOS and Linux (GTK). For nerds it’s also interesting because it’s implemented in Zig.

Continue Reading →

Building a Tiny CDN With pyinfra and Chimera Linux

In my quest to make linkedlist.org—my link blog—faster, I set up multiple deployments around the world. I used pyinfra to automate the process and Chimera Linux as the host operating system. Join me on this adventure in over-engineering to see how I dropped the average response time across nine global locations from 807ms to 189ms without spending a fortune.

Network diagram of Linked List infrastructure A network diagram showing a user at the top. An arrow from the user points downward to a node labelled Gcore GeoDNS. Three dashed arrows point down from the Gcore node to three servers labelled: AU, FR, and NY. Below the servers at the bottom of the diagram is another smaller server titled Qotom. It has arrows pointing up to each of the other servers with a label over the arrows, "Certs".

A diagram of what we’re building.1

Continue Reading →

Generating a Static Website From a Pleroma Archive

Almost two years ago, in Jan 2023 I migrated from my Fediverse presence from my self-hosted Pleroma instance to a single user Mastodon instance hosted by masto.host. Since then I’ve wanted to retire the Pleroma instance, but I didn’t want to just take it offline. I wanted to preserve my posts and links to them. That became a priority over the weekend so I built a tool, pleroma-archive to do it.

Continue Reading →

Building and Launching My New Link Blog, linkedlist.org (Twice)

I’ve started a new tech focused link blog over at linkedlist.org. “Not another tech blog”, I hear you groan, and rightly so. However my intention is not to cover topics that are already well reported upon like Apple, Google, Microsoft, the latest drama at OpenAI, and other stuff like that. Instead, I plan to focus more open-source, programming, hardware, software, Linux, Rust, retro computing etc. There’s some more details in the welcome post.

In this post I’m going to cover the process I took to the build the site (twice) and some of the considerations that went into it—for a site with only a handful of pages there was a surprising amount of them.

Continue Reading →

Australian Chimera Linux Mirror

I have set up a mirror of repo.chimeralinux.org on a server in Australia (Brisbane). It’s been running well for a couple of weeks now. The root of the mirror shows an index of what is hosted and when it was last synced. /chimera is where the Chimera data lives.

It mirrors the packages as well as ISO and rootfs downloads. Using the mirror greatly speeds up package downloads, which in-turn makes things like apk upgrade a lot faster. Some rudimentary testing suggests this this server may also provide a speed improvement for folks in parts of Asia too.

Continue Reading →
View more posts →

Projects

A selection of projects I've built or contributed to:

View more projects →