One week with FreeBSD 13 on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 - Part One
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Last edited: $Date: 2021/07/11 08:48:19 $
Solene's Challenge
------------------
Solene posted a challenge on her website
https://dataswamp.org/~solene and on Mastodon. It is the so
called The Old Computer Challenge, see
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-
challenge.html.
The point of the challenge is to replace your daily computer
by a very old computer.
For this, I got nostalgic, and got my old faithful Acer Aspire
One ZG5 from the attic.
### Acer Aspire One ZG5
The Acer Aspire One ZG5 is a first generation Acer Aspire and
came to the market as a EEE PC competitor.
This machine comes with an Atom processor, 8 Gb solid state
storage and 512 Mb RAM, 802.11b/g wireless network and a
10/100 Ethernet port. The screen is 1024x600 8.9 inch TFT
panel.
The keyboard is not a full size keyboard, due to the small
form factor of the laptop.
The laptop has two SD-card slots, which on the original Linpus
Linux version could be used as an extension of the 8 Gb on
board storage.
#### Crippled by Microsoft
Netbooks from this period, like this Aspire, are all crippled
because of Microsoft.
In the era of the netbook, Microsoft came up with some crazy
requirements for netbooks, like too low RAM-size ceiling and a
not too capable CPU. OEM manufacturers had to comply, to be
allowed to put a less expensive netbook-version of Windows on
it.
#### Power cable only
Unfortunately, my Aspire One will only run with the power
cable attached, the machine is not capable anymore to load the
battery. Before moving this laptop to the attic some years
ago, I tried it with a different battery, but with the same
result.
First contact
-------------
Although this netbook has been my daily driver for several
years, it needed some TLC.
There was an old, outdated Debian version on it, so that had
to be replaced.
For fun, I tried to put FreeBSD 13 on it. So I downloaded the
i386 memstick image and installed that.
It turned out that the WiFi chip actually works on FreeBSD, as
far as I know this was a no-go in the heydays of the Aspire.
After the memstick installer has done its job, I installed
tmux, Xorg, the ratpoison window manager, ratmen and git
(ratmen is a better version of ratmenu). This seemed to take
forever, writing to the local storage is really, really s-l-o-
w.
### Display
When everything is installed, I started up X and looked at the
nice and friendly TWM window manager. I had to set up my
.xinitrc to get ratpoion started. It turn out that Xorg sets
this display at 800x600. So, there is something in the FreeBSD
setup that I have to change, to get a proper 1024x600 display.
Day one
-------
### Problems, problems
I booted the Acer and now there are a ton of disk errors. Not
happy.
I tried to put my home directory in ram-disk (a.k.a. memory
file system), but it turned out that the writing of fstab
failed, and the laptop totally locked.
After a reboot it turned out that fstab had completely
disappeared. So, with the installer memstick I created a new
fstab (ed is your friend), with the disk in read only mode and
home in ram-disk.
I renamed my home directory and created a new one, as a mount
point for the ram-disk.
I rebooted and was able to work for about an hour.
This way I could work for about an hour on this machine. Then
the disk-activity LED kept burning permanently, and the
machine froze. After a reboot it didn't get up anymore, only
long list of disk errors.
The BIOS doesn't have an option to disable the SSD.
So this was the end of the game.
Day two
-------
### Open heart surgery
It seems that the broken SSD prevented the Acer from booting,
and like this it was nothing more than a nostalgic paper
weight.
So, I decided to see if I could disconnect the SSD from the
motherboard.
With the aide of ifixit.com I tried to disassemble the laptop.
See
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Acer+Aspire+One+ZG5+Hard+Drive+Replacement/3784
Unfortunately, two tiny screws at the back of the laptop,
under the battery, didn't came loose and from now on will
never get loose, unless by excessive use of sheer power.
So I wasn't able to completely disassemble the laptop, but I
could lift the topsite just far enough to get my fingers in
and, gambling that I had the right connector, removed the
ribbon from what I thought was the connector of the SSD.
With the keyboard and trackpad still disconnected, and
everything still open, I inserted the bootable USB stick,
connected the power and started the laptop. It booted!
So that was great news, I had indeed disconnected the SSD and
not some other component.
From another machine I logged on over SSH and halted the
laptop again.
After this I tried to assemble everything, but was worried
about the ribbons of the keyboard and trackpad. I tried to
reconnect these ribbons, but felt very unsure if I had did
this right.
So, with the keyboard still loose and almost in its right
place, I booted again to test the connections. Both the
keyboard and trackpad worked :)
After this, I halted the laptop again and put everything in
place. This almost succeeded: there is one tiny screw left.
I again booted the machine, tested the keyboard and trackpad.
Result: surgery has succeeded, we do have a working laptop.
### Back in business
So, now the Acer is back in business again and the game of the
user config starts again, so configuring ratpoison, xterminal,
and so on.
This are the first packages that I installed, according to
`pkg query -e '%a = 0' %o | sort`:
devel/rcs
editors/emacs
misc/unclutter
ports-mgmt/pkg
sysutils/tmux
www/lynx
www/w3m
x11-wm/ratmen
x11-wm/ratpoison
x11/xorg
x11/xterm
After having installed these packages, the total number of
installed packages is 211. Welcome to the wonderful world of
dependencies.
What the list above doesn't show, it that I had actually
installed emacs-nox, otherwise the total number of installed
packages would be a lot higher.
### Display
After toying around I finally got the display in X to
1024x600. This involved installing another number of packages,
like drm-kmod, gpu-firmware-kmod, and adding my user to the
'video' group.
### Firefox
I also installed Firefox. Another load of packages, but did
turn out to be a big mistake.
Firefox is way to heavy for this laptop (I guess both because
of the limited amount of RAM as well as the lack of CPU
power). So, I try to get around with lynx, w3m and eww.
### Weather
"prahou" on the libera.chat channel #old-computer-challenge
came with `curl
http://wttr.in/Berlin`, in which you can
replace Berlin with the name of another city. This is a nice
solution for a ancient laptop :)
### Packages
After installing Git, Firefox, Neofetch and some stuff to
finally get the display to the native resolution, the counter
now stands on 347.
I haven't installed Libreoffice, LaTeX and all that, I don't
expect those to be useable on this machine.
More to follow!
