💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › openbsd-on-an-eeepc-1005ha.tx… captured on 2023-01-29 at 16:13:25.
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OpenBSD on an eeePC 1005HA -------------------------- My parents came to visit me recently, for the first time since I moved to Finland. From all the way across the world they brought with them an old 10" Asus eeePC running Windows XP, that they had purchased many years and no longer use, and which nobody else in my family wanted. I was much happier to receive this cast-off than you might expect. I fully realise that it's not an especially desirable bit of hardware. Although it's a decade old, it's not really old enough and different enough from modern machines to have any kind of retrocomputing cachet. But I'm excited because it's a machine that's entirely surplus to my actual daily computing requirements and therefore it's a machine that I can do whatever I want with. There's no need to be concerned with practicality, it's not a problem if it can't manage to do some essential ask. I can set it up with as obscure and difficult to use a configuration as I like. I knew right away that I wanted something minimalistic and entirely non-graphical. A pure, ascetic kind of experience. I also hoped that maybe I could put something a little exotic on there. I have long harboured a real softspot for Minix, due largley to having played around with a 2.x version which I installed from a series of 3.5" floppies on an old 386 or 486 machine, way back when. I have followed the development of Minix 3 with interest, especially after the started using the NetBSD userland. I play with it on virtual machines from time to time, but have never actually used it on bare metal. Alas, to my surprise I discovered that the latest versions have no support for USB whatsoever, which ended that idea pretty quickly. I was pondering other options when I read jynx's positive impression of OpenBSD on his Fujitsu Lifebook[1] (an actually interesting little machine!). OpenBSD is another system which is really close to my heart and which I also haven't used in a very long time, so I thought "why not?". I've had 6.4 installed on it for about 24 hours now, and so far it's been a very pleasant experience. The installation was extremely straightforward, everything simply worked - including the wifi, no mucking about with firmware or anything like that required. Suspend and resume worked immediately once I enabled apmd. The sound just works. None of this may sound terrible impressive to people used to Ubuntu, or Mint, or whatever the "I just want it to work without me having to configure anything" crowd are using these days. But it's quite a treat indeed to have this level of hardware support and "just works"iness out of a system which is small and simple and neat. It's especially impressive when you consider that OpenBSD is possibly the last OS project left on the planet who stick to their guns and Just Say No to binary blob drivers and refuse to sign NDAs in exchange for hardware documentation. I am really enjoying the simplicity of the package management system, compared to the hodge-podge of apt-*, aptitude and dpkg-*, and of the rc-based init system compared to systemd. It all gives me warm fuzzies. My original intention was not to make any use of X11 at all on this machine and just stick to the console. This is even more appealing than it otherwise would be due to OpenBSD's quite unique console font. But I'm not sure that's necessarily going to work out long term. The OpenBSD console, as far as I understand, does not have support for any UTF-8 fonts. This has caused more problems than I would have expected. For example, the version of mutt installed at the Zaibatsu uses non-ASCII characters to draw the arrows indicated threaded emails, and dvtm uses non-ASCII characters to draw frames around windows. Right now, all of these characters are rendered as ?s for me, which is no fun at all. I fear that the only way around it will be to switch to the most minimal X-based setup I can manage. Maybe I'll have to experiment with running just a single terminal emulator without any window manager. [1] gopher://1436.ninja:70/0/Phlog/20190220.post