It's dead, Jim.
By which I mean, the computer on which I started this site. To be fair, that was not a very long time ago. My ode to it can be read in my last blog post, which I forgot to date and now I can't remember when I wrote it. Hmm. Anyway...
This is a story all about how / My life got flipped, turned upside down / And I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there / I'll tell you how I learned to back up my shit.
So, I would like you to imagine that I am logging onto my old Acer like I usually do. Again, for context, see last post. I never really shut it down, I just turn the screen off, so I can ssh into it from more usable computers if I just need to use the terminal. My router blocks ssh though, so I can only do it at home. Similarly with running socket servers. I knew I'd done the Python right when I got told my firewall was blocking my homemade socket server. Given my parents, justifiably, don't want to open bits of the firewall to random traffic, I've sort of hit a brick wall on that one.
So I sit down, and hammer the Enter key until it turns on. Except it doesn't. So I restart it.
This does not go well.
Anyone who uses Linux knows that it does not boot cleanly like proprietary OSes, instead giving you a wall of console font for the few seconds of booting (and the delicious noise of my disc drive spinning up) before it gives you the login screen.
Amongst this is all the little errors that usually it just sorts out on its own. These things happen all the time and are sorted out all the time, just usually in the background. The one that always came up on mine was that it expected a PS/2 port where there was none. Man, I have enough trauma from the PS/2 ports that all the school computers use, and the smell of the dust when you take them out and blow into them. Mmm, ancient skin cells.
Anyway, this time, it just hung.
It got stuck waiting for a Forcepoint ack call, specifically, and then the screen filled with Incomprehensible Bullshit. No, really, I still don't know what it was and I didn't bother recording it.
In the words of Monty Python, the Acer has passed on. The Acer is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. It's a stiff. Bereft of jet engine noises, it rests in recovery mode. Its processes are now history. It's off the twig. It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, it's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. THIS... IS AN EX-ACER.
In other words, it's dead, Jim.
Anyway, technically I can recover my stuff, but I can't be arsed. I can rake through the Debian repos anew for fun stuff, and reinstall that CDE theme from The Hub (no, the other one) and go back and find all my desktop wallpapers. It's fine.
And yes, technically, I could just do a clean install of Debian and start again, assuming I wouldn't just run into the same issues again. But I don't want to.
Despite my love for it, out of childhood memories, and out of it being the first thing I ever ran Linux on, and out of being the first thing I played terminal games on, or generally played around with, as you can only truly do with FLOSS stuff, fundamentally, it was a shitbox. Hell, even when I was setting it up, I set the hostname as '@worstlaptopever', because it was! It was on life support the whole time I knew it, this huge, bulky thing that had to be plugged in at all times or it'd immediately shut down. And by the time I resurrected it, the trackpad didn't work, so I ended up basically just using it as a monitor with an external keyboard and mouse. And I gaslit myself into thinking I was happy with it.
But ding dong, the witch is dead, and now I have another laptop to play with.
It's a Dell Latitude of some variety, and it's much smaller, and much lighter, yet somehow it has about twice as many ports and still has a DVD drive. (Note: I had to use the pin of a halogen lightbulb to get Civ4 out of the Acer. It was a long fight. Somehow the damn lightbulb was the closest pin-shaped thing. I don't even know anymore.) As well as this miracle in itself, it also has a working keyboard and trackpad. It still has no battery life, but I am told that the battery may actually be easily replaceable by the user, and anyway, the charger is far more compact. It's faster, and it's sturdier, and I've only just installed Debian on it, but I love it. It's still very kludgy, but the hostname is '@jalopy' instead, because it is a jalopy. And I am proud. It is old and broken but it runs, and it is a thing of beauty, unlike the Acer. It is one beautiful bastard, and it is a jalopy, and I will honour its status as such.
So anyway, I've learned an important lesson, because at some point I'm going to have to knuckle down and actually get everything reinstalled on this. The lesson is in two parts:
1: Back up your shit. I already back up all of my important files on the cloud, because I do almost everything on the cloud anyway, but what I mean is this: go and find all the packages that you have manually installed and make a list of them and put it somewhere. I remember what I had on my desktop, but there's no way in hell I remember the million or so little terminal games I had, so I'm going to have to trawl through the Debian repos again. As well as this, if you're like me and spend a lot of time on appearances, make a similar list for custom XFCE themes (others are available) and desktop wallpapers and such, and store it in the cloud.
2: It doesn't need to be all or nothing. Before The Great Brick of 2026, I had A FLOSS Computer and A Non-FLOSS Computer. The FLOSS Computer was the Acer, which was FLOSS all the way down except for the bootloader, because ain't no way am I trying to flash that with Libreboot. The Non-FLOSS Computer was, up until fairly recently, my blue Chromebook, but is now my vastly-superior Mac, handed down from my dad. It's incredibly high-powered, and only makes even a suggestion of struggling if, for example, you were running multiple windows of Fusion 360 on it. Like my dad, an engineer who used this as his daily work laptop for six years before I got it. I'm so lucky that his standards are so high.
Anyway, the twain never met. The Mac was and is my daily, and the actually practical one, but isn't FLOSS. The Acer was FLOSS, but besides that, was shit. However, I have realised that this is stupid. Just because I'm not running Debian on the Mac doesn't mean I have to sit and sulk about it not being FLOSS, just like how I don't sit and sulk about not having Libreboot. So as well as reinstalling all my stuff from the Acer on the new Dell, I'm going to try and install as much of it as possible on the Mac. I've already switched over fully to Firefox and Thunderbird. I don't think I'll get the terminal games working, and I have to pay for the Mac version ofBeneath A Steel Sky, but besides that I should be able to get the rest of it working.
I have no clue why I didn't think of doing this earlier. I think I must have thought there was something to the ritual, of entering a space, of the old Acer being spiritually pure in some way. As well as my portal to the FLOSS world, it was also my access to places like IRC and Usenet and all the various MOOs I frequent, as well as older parts that were abandoned completely, almost a kind of digital urbexing. As I said, I guess the age and the brokenness and the kludginess and the Linuxery of the Acer made it spiritually pure in some way that felt like it fit with all those places, and that using the Mac felt vaguely sacreligious in comparison.
Well, fuck that.
Places are meant to be visited, and I wasn't visiting them, simply for the hassle of using the goddamn Acer, so if I can visit them on the Mac, I will. Anyway, I feel it's a moral duty of mine, given that I may literally be the only person going to some of them. I have to document them. I have to keep them alive.
So yeah, I'm going to revive the Dell, and I'm going to have fun running Debian on it.
But I'll be damned if I don't do everything but on the Mac.