Older blog entries for Gilbou (starting at number 2)

20 May 2011 »

finished installing openbsd on the loongson-2f machine. was quite easy. just dumping with dd the openbsd 4.9 miniroot.fs on a usb key, boot it from pmon (i really like the way it handles devices, /dev/fs/<filesytem>@<device>/path/to/whatever). seems much more handy to use than what i was used to on sun machines :p the battery should give the netbook about 1h30 of life, but it goes a little above. machine kept running for 1h50 before shutting down. at 3 % the netbook suddenly shot down so openbsd won't be happy and fsck the whole thing. need to write a script that does a shutdown when battery reaches 5 % or so (suspend/sleep not supported yet). that will teach me not to respect what that battery blinking red led means running at full cpu speed (797 MHz) after 1h apm reported battery at 47 % with an estimated running time left of 51 min. after 1h45 17 % was left, and then battery started going down fast. at 1h47 there was 3 % left. since it's a new battery running its very first charge, things will get better after 3/5 full decharge/charge cycles. autonomy at full speed is 1h50 to 2h which is quite good for a 23 Wh battery. here is the openbsd 4.9 dmesg for the machine. X currently runs in non accelerated mode, using frame buffer. only one console in vt110 so you need to install screen on console. launching X is just typing startx. right now i am using the defaut fvwm window manager preinstalled with it, does the job for now. wonder if i'll install gnome or not since i mostly spend all my time over a dozen xterms. frame buffer runs at 1024 x 600 (screen resolution, it's 10 inches) in 16 bits/pixel. i took two screenshots using xwd : first shows a top running with a uname -a for the platform (mips, 64-bits, little endian). second shows installation of a few packages using pkg_add. i need to install a lightweight wm. probably will be xfce. machine does run gnome (i think the default linux i removed was using gnome) but i am still wondering.

19 May 2011 »

just received my lemote yeelong netbook, the 8101B model. it uses a loongson-2F chip (chinese made, MIPS-III based with some IV operands, very low power, 64-bit out of order execution). i took a lot of pictures of the machine from the box to pictures with a centimers/inches ruler so you can check its size. machine is notable for its open hardware approach : nothing inside of it uses nor requires a binary blob. even the bios is available in source : it's PMON, and written in C, with all sources available. every part of the machine is thus available for hacking which makes it, in my opinion, the hacker's choice. i do think this machine is currently the only one used by the venerable stallman. wikipedia has information about the chip and platform. it comes with linux and i believe debian can be installed on it. i am going to replace the linux with openbsd so i won't be able to tell you about linux on it, i won't even try it. can be bought from two places in europe : hackable devices (wim works there, of kd85 fame) and tekmote.nl ; if you are in europe, this will avoid you paying custom tax for ordering it (VAT will be paid in the country you buy it, either Belgium for hackable devices, or Netherlands for Tekmote). i will soon post a full article about how openbsd is installed and used on the platform, and make sure even a total noob with no bsd knowledge can buy one, install bsd and start learning what a real unix looks like, you penguin stuffing kiddies out there ! =)

18 May 2011 (updated 18 May 2011 at 22:44 UTC) »

recreated my account. previous posts gone :p not been doing much lately so will only give a few links that might be interesting to people using some old crappy hardware, like using netbsd on soekris 4801, setting up the hibernation partition on thinkpad to have it work nicely with bsd, and doing a full disk cgd encrypt install of netbsd. i got some web pages from my first computer to almost the last one (got some update to do there). on a less serious level, i got a collection of some bsd pics and funny pics collected over some years of browsing