OpenBSD Upgrade on a T43p

Just pulled out the T43p and upgraded it to 7.3. It's so slow, with the PATA plater drive and single core; but it still chugs along and so I pull it out every once and again to update and browse the web like it's 2005.

And of course OpenBSD still runs just fine. It's probably been half a decade since the XP install was wiped and replaced with whatever the then current OpenBSD release was. I used to pull the bsd.rd from http and boot that from the loader prompt; these days, sysupgrade(8) and syspatch(8) do all the work.

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jmcunx, 10 months ago

How much memory. Also are you waiting for the kernel relink to complete ?

I have OpenBSD 7.3 on a R51e and it works fine, zippy considering. But of course, Firefox is a no go . It has 2gig memory, but I always wait for the relink to complete :)

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otl, 11 months ago

Nice one. It’s funny; I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have the rest of the hardware be so much faster than the disk.

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unix_joe, 11 months ago

There is a SATA mod for the T43p that I never got around to doing. I guess 20 years in, it's not happening.

And also some PATA SSD's out there that probably cost as much as the laptop is worth. That's the realistic path forward.

But this is fine for now. I literally pull the laptop out about twice a year anymore, usually to update the install and then browse the web slowly for a few hours. The rest of the time it sits on a shelf, plugged in as to not let the battery completely drain.

I imagine i386 OpenBSD will be supported for another couple of decades. It wasn't that long ago that VAX was dropped.

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