Since I recently bought a "new" desktop [0], my old desktop was now
sitting idle. This was a refurbished PC from 2009 that I bought in
2016. I upgraded the memory to 16GB, the maximum it could support,
and used it for seven years as a daily driver. When I was thinking
of how I could make use of it now, I thought back to 2009, and
remembered Debian Lenny. Debian Lenny was a wonderful desktop and
rock-solid server back in 2009, so it seemed fitting for this
particular PC.

I hoped I would not have much difficulty installing Lenny, given the
matching age of the hardware. First, I downloaded the DVD iso images
from the Debian archive server, then burned the first three to
physical media. The install went smoothly - Lenny was probably the
first Debian version to automate a lot of what we take for granted
now in installers, like disk partitioning. The only hardware hiccup
was related to my far newer 27" monitor. I had to manually generate
an Xorg.conf file (Xorg -configure) and replace the installed
version. Once done, I had a working Gnome2 desktop and could adjust
the screen resolution as desired, to a maximum of 1920x1080.

One of the issues I noticed right away was that the OpenSSH version
installed with Lenny (OpenSSH v5) was too old to connect to the
newest v9 servers that are becoming more common, including the ssh
server on the SDF NetBSD 9.3 cluster, and the tilde.team server. I
downloaded a newer version from openssh.com - not too new, but just
new enough, I figured. That was v7.0 from 2014. It compiled and
installed cleanly, and solved all of my SSH connectivity issues.

The final hurdle was only partially fixable. Lenny ships with the
Debian-branded Firefox called Iceweasel, which supports only SSL and
TLSv1. Since all the large commercial and e-commerce sites disabled
SSL and TLSv1 support years ago, you can forget doing any shopping,
banking or social media on this box (which I immediately realized
was a feature, not a bug). However, many older sites load fine once
you accept their "expired" certificates (a major root cert expired
two years ago), and many other sites can be accessed via the
frogfind proxy [1]. There are also some older websites that either
still support SSL/TLSv1, or just plain old HTTP, which I wish was
more prevalent. I'm finding it a fun exercise making a list of which
sites I can still get to, and discovering new and cool sites. I'll
share the list at some point.

[0]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/glog/trisquel-11-new-desktop.md
[1]: http://frogfind.com