Inspired by some phlog posts from Solene I decided to install OpenBSD
6.8 on an old laptop that was gathering dust under my rolling cabinet.
I already tried to install FreeBSD on it once, but I failed to get the
wifi working. I got the firmware and I got it to list the ssid's of
seemingly every neighbors' wifi router, but it would not show mine. I
simply could not connect to it.
This laptop is my very first one, I bought it during my university
years. It is an Acer Aspire 3690 with a Celeron CPU. After I got a new
desktop I wanted my wife to have it, so that she could learn
something about using a computer. I even bought a new battery as the
original one was pretty much dead. However my wife simply does not
want to use computers, so even now I am managing her online banking
and whatnot. She is happy with her iPad mini, but she is using it
only for messaging, calls, facebook and for visiting cooking sites.
But her relation to computers is another story...
So I downloaded the OpenBSD 6.8 image and did dd it to a flash drive,
but the laptop would not boot from it. The built-in LiteOn SSM-8515S
DVD-RW drive is trash, it can't even read disks anymore. Maybe the
flash drive is faulty too, but I could not get it to work. So I
dowloaded the CD image, burnt it and used a USB drive with success.
I went with the defaults and was really surprized that OpenBSD
detected the Broadcom BCM4318 wifi device and installed the firmware
for it. So I did not have to run fw_update manually. Then I created
/etc/hostname.bwi0 with the following content:
nwid <ssid> wpakey <key>
dhcp
And voila, it had wifi connection. It's not really super fast, but I
have wifi on it! In fact I am writing this on the Acer using a mosh
connection from my tablet. I compiled fossil on it (although there is
a pretty recent version among the packages, but I wanted the latest
stable one) and cloned my phlog management ksh script repo and the
gopher repo. So when this is ready I only have to do an update on
SDF-EU.
So that it does not go to sleep when closing the lid I added the
following to /etc/sysctl.conf:
machdep.lidaction=0
It has an 80 GB hard drive, that's more than enough to fool a bit
around. Even X worked out of the box, I just needed to start xenodm.
fvwm is very basic with the default settings, but maybe I'll customize
it a bit.
