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9Front for the Strange But True
July 2 2021
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In case anyone out there was wondering, 9Front both boots and runs
quite well on a Thinkpad W520, once you've got a handle on *how* to
set it up. Here are a few notes about that process.
I recently acquired this computer as a refurb. It has 16 GB of RAM,
a 500 GB SSD, and was in surprisingly good shape considering its age.
Touchpad/Scroll Point:
Flawless out of the box. Adjust acceleration to your taste in
lib/profile.
Wireless card:
Works, but not right away. You're looking for the iwn6000
driver, placed in /lib/firmware. Once it is installed there,
recompile your kernel and move the new kernel to the 9fat
partition.
Bind #l1 to '/net/ether1'.
Then use a short script like this one for convenience:
You can save SSIDs with their credentials in factotum.
The Ethernet NIC works immediately as /net/ether0.
Screen:
Using VESA only, you can comfortably go up to 1920x1080x32. Not bad!
ACPI:
*sigh* Yes, it works. Wish it didn't have to. *acpi=1 in plan9.ini
is the option you need.
Battery:
Easily monitored with ACPI, in stats, and/or Sigrid's 'bar' program.
... battery life isn't ideal. About 3 hours on a full charge. This came
with a 9 cell.
vmx:
Works once enabled in the BIOS. Single-core only at the moment,
successfully booted and installed OpenBSD 6.7.
As a huge amount of my work as a network/system admin is logging into
remote systems with SSH, looking up information as I need it in text
form, and editing plaintext for programs and documentation, this
laptop is now plenty useful with 9Front alone.
However, if I ever need a local Docker instance, need to write code
locally in an unsupported language, or need a modern web browser for
something, the good news is that I can dual boot into Void Linux in
another partition. GRUB still supports booting 9Front if you know
where the kernel is located.
Having 9Front on bare metal for a change is a lot of fun. Let's see
where this goes!
