OpenBSD on an eeePC 1005HA
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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
