Wesley Moore

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Over the course of the last few months some fine folks in the Linux community have been plugging away implementing support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X based ARM laptops. Recently Canonical published Ubuntu 24.10 Concept for testing on these laptops, which I installed and tested on my Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.

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.

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.

JSON Feed is a specification for representing an RSS-style feed in JSON. I wanted to add one as an alternative alongside the Atom feed on a new website I’m building. The website is built with Zola, which unfortunately doesn’t support the format, so this is how I went about adding one.

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.