OpenBSD on an eeePC 1005HA

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