Tuesday, November 11, 2008

bsdtalk162 - BSD on a eeePC 900A

I look forward to attending MeetBSD this weekend.

A brief description of my first attempts to get BSD on a eeePC 900A. I try OpenBSD 4.4, DragonFlyBSD 2.0.1, PC-BSD 7.0.1, and FreeBSD 7.

File Info: 10Min, 5MB.

Ogg Link:
https://archive.org/download/bsdtalk162/bsdtalk162.ogg

10 comments:

Rhaen said...

NetBSD is has nearly perfect support for the eeekPC models 701 and 900, 901. Please have a look at the special webpage for the netbooks at:

http://www.netbsd.org/ports/i386/netbook.html

and tell about your experiences.

Great show - looking forward to the next one.

Unknown said...

The atheros chip uses a binary blob, so it's not loaded by default, at least for DragonFly.

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2008-11/msg00023.html

Of course, it looks like it didn't boot to the point where you could have used it. It could be a problem with the USB system - maybe the loader couldn't find the kernel on the USB DVD drive. You can boot the normal DragonFly installer in a different computer and pick the netboot option, and install over the network. I was able to do this to get DragonFly on a Sony laptop that had no CD-ROM at all.

If these things were just a little cheaper, I'd try it myself. How do you like the keyboard?

HeavensRevenge said...

Hello there, there has been this interesting EeeBSD project and its for the 700 series, but it seems generally similar, also for the wireless chipset try this blob instead of the one listed ( http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/special/madwifi-ng-r3366+ar5007.tar.gz ) since its simply just the newest revision for what is used.
Good luck :P

HeavensRevenge said...

AHEM... forgot the EeeBSD reference URL...:
http://nighthack.org/wiki/EeeBSD

Unknown said...

Oh, and post your DragonFly issues on bugs@dragonflybsd.org - unless one of the developers has a similar model, it may not be caught before the next release.

Daniel said...

Great podcast! I am going to give BSD a try on my Eee 901 series see what happen.

Anonymous said...

There you have some overview for OpenBSD 4.4 and Asus EEE 900A:

http://daemonforums.org/showpost.php?p=18113&postcount=3

For FreeBSD 7 stable and wifi, you just need a new HAL: http://people.freebsd.org/~sam/

And there you can find ale for Current and stable, then you'll have lan:

http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/ale/ale.20081030.tar.gz

It's not out of the box, but it's possible =)

More information, at least for FreeBSD:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee

Rudi K said...

Hello,

Excellent pod cast as usuall, just one small correction. Ubunto is pronounced Ooo-boon-to

Cheers
Rudi

Rev said...

@Rhaen: nearly perfect? I know the definition of "good enough" is different from person to person, but my experience suggests otherwise- at least for the Eee PC 900 and 900A.

On both of them, NetBSD 5.0.1 doesn't support the 10/100 ethernet, WLAN, or trackpad.

One point in OpenBSD 4.6's favor is that the ethernet is supported, though the WLAN isn't. Better than nothing- at least enough to bootstrap WLAN support.

Justin said...

freebsd 8.0 works pretty much flawlessly. ive been running it for about 3 months now and everything pretty much works. wlan and ethernet work out of the box, although i had to create wlan0 for ath0 to work properly. the only real problem that ive run into is disk space. my 900a only has a 4g ssd and its maxed out(w/o ports installed). i havent been able to update anything on it due to disk space. so i think im going to reinstall and put /usr on an sd card or something. heres my how to http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=5897