• Hardware: Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S4510 with BIOS 1.36 from 1999. Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 0.4GHz single core, 32 KiB L1 cache, 256KiB L2 cache. 256 MiB SDRAM at 100 MHz with an empty second slot. Internal Lithium-ion battery with 28 Wh capacity. Versatile I/O including IDE for hard drive, IDE-like CD/SuperDisk drive, PCMCIA with adapters for various connections. External connectors like VGA, USB 1.1, Ethernet, etc. and a passive docking station with more ports.
• Software: Played around 9 years ago with antiX (Debian fork without systemd) which worked. Tried to install Windows 98 or XP at the congress. BIOS can't boot from USB. Used Plop boot manager. Windows installation faced issues like bluescreen with STOP: 0x0[...]07B error (likely due to AHCI instead of IDE). CDs and SuperDisk had I/O errors. USB stick creation for Windows XP was hard with various tools. Tried multiple ISOs with no success. Booting installers from CD also failed. Eventually tried on another old desktop PC and it worked but the old laptop still had problems. For Linux, mainstream distributions have slim i686 support. Debian 12 netinstaller ISO booted on USB with low memory warning but worked by loading only required modules. Built NixOS for i686-linux during the congress. Had issues with syslinux compilation. Installed nix with apt and ran hello. Later built a full base system and faced problems with openssh and nsncd. Rust on i686 has issues without SSE4 support. Fixed PCMCIA issue in nixpkgs to make CompactFlash storage available as swap.
• Summary: The author brought an old 1999 Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to the congress and had various adventures trying to install different operating systems. Windows installation faced many difficulties while Linux had some challenges too. NixOS was built but had issues with openssh and other components. Eventually, some problems were fixed and the laptop is now running NixOS with swap enabled.