Mastodawn

OpenBSD Now!Mar 15

OpenBSD adventures, day two. My MacBook with arm64 is running fine under OpenBSD, but there is no video acceleration, so it can't play full-screen videos.

I started to think what I can do about it, and I realised that we had a few e-waste Chromebooks bought for $20 apiece. It's 1.5GHz Celeron, and it is as dodgy as laptops get: it is spray-painted, it is made of cheap plastic, and the keyboard and the touchpad are both kind of only look like real ThinkPad but there were so many corners cut making it that I can't type "root" without it missing a letter or two every other time. This is what kids apparently were using in schools ten years ago or so?

Some things are glacially slow, but Xfce4 is quite usable, and it can play YouTube in 720p. Everything the laptop has to offer seems to be working (even webcam).

It works incredible for an ultra-low-end device from 2013.

Nina Kalinina Mar 14

On a whim, I connected this e-waste laptop to my graphical tablet (second hand, 2017? model). It works; the double-mouse situation (pen+touchpad) is a bit wonky, and the pressure events are not recognised. I bet there's a setting for it somewhere. I installed pre-packaged Krita, and the whole setup seems to work more or less as well as it does on MacBook Air M1 under MacOS. This machine, according to benchmarks, is on par with Athlon 64 from 2006 or smartphones from ten~ years ago

@nina_kali_nina
still running under openBSD?

Nina Kalinina Mar 14

@Etch9 yep! I'm now building libresprite (libre Aseprite) on it, as it isn't packaged, and it seems to be compiling it just like a little champ it is. On a 1.5 GHz Celeron. With a 32GB SSD. On a system that, by all measures, is very obscure.

And if it doesn't compile, I can get a Linux emulator or wine. The possibilities...

@nina_kali_nina x61 tablet can be used as a pressure sensitive wacom digitizer for another machine through socat

Nina Kalinina Mar 15

@wyatt wowsers xD

@nina_kali_nina x201 also works, anything with a serial "penabled" digitizer

cthos 🐱Mar 14

@nina_kali_nina My office laptop is a 2015 Macbook Air 11" running Manjaro with XFCE and it still works great. Only issue I've run into so far is some package wants to rebuild itself and that looks like it's going to take over a day.

Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud Mar 14

@nina_kali_nina I know 2 things: I really like the bells & whistles of KDE, and XFCE works really well on the oldest & shittiest of hardware!

Parade du Grotesque 💀Mar 14

@nina_kali_nina

One word for you: fluxbox. 😉

Just kidding.

Nina Kalinina Mar 14

@ParadeGrotesque I'm more of an openbox person, or jwm really. Yeah, jwm is kind of nice... But xfce doesn't seem to be too hard on this machine, either.

Stefan Sperling Mar 14

@nina_kali_nina

I got one of these the year they came out and made the card reader in it work which at the time didn't have driver support on any BSD yet. Happy days.

Nina Kalinina Mar 14

@stsp oh, lovely! Thanks 🥰

@nina_kali_nina yoah, 8GB of RAM! Is it replaceable? My Acer CB3-111 from that era had 2GB

Nina Kalinina Mar 14

@pak0st it has two slots to have 2x2GB DDR3, but few years ago this RAM was basically "no one needs it, take these 2x4GB for free". It cannot support any more RAM, though.

@nina_kali_nina that's very impressive. The little nugget is refreshingly built to last.

Nina Kalinina Mar 14

@pak0st it is far more repairable than modern computers, yes. It was locked down to be Chrome only, but my fiancée had to desolder the flash chip to reflash it with a normal UEFI

passthejoe Mar 14

@[email protected] Most things run well with Xfce. Pretty much everybody can have a real DE if they want one.

@nina_kali_nina you're lucky that this machine is so old that it has SATA, as eMMC is somehow broken on BSDs. I didn't have time to investigate, but last time I tried to boot OpenBSD on a newer model from 2018 (ApolloLake), it threw a kernel panic when I tried to modify the partition table.

I checked ACPI tables and they looked fine, so there must be something about intel's sdhci drivers in OpenBSD/NetBSD that's broken (whereas it works on Linux). I should try it on Picasso (Ryzen 3000) to see if amd sdhci works

Nina Kalinina Mar 15

@elly this one boots from nvme, no idea what driver it uses, I can check if you're interested

@nina_kali_nina hold on, this can't be right. First Chromebooks that used NVME appeared with 10th generation of Intel CPUs, such as KOHAKU (Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, my personal daily-driver).

Pretty sure that you have a STOUT, I fixed one of those at FOSDEM ~3 years ago (and got nice Fedora gloves from RedHat's engineer as thanks, I'm still wearing them

)

Nina Kalinina Mar 15

@elly I guess not every pcie ssd is nvme, huh! It is Stout, according to dmesg. Both disks - the "clearly SATA" and the "pcb with the flash" - are detected as SATA by the system. I had no idea SATA had a slot version 🤯

@nina_kali_nina oh, then it must be mSATA

Nina Kalinina Mar 15

@elly it seems to be, yeah! I'm sorry, I know almost nothing about computers made in this century

@nina_kali_nina no need to apologize

neocat_pat_floof

Me and my friends are just *perfectly normal* about Chromebooks

Irenes (many)Mar 15

@elly @nina_kali_nina there will be some sort of matter-annihilation event if the chromebook polycule ever links up to the linux polycule

Irenes (many)Mar 15

@elly @nina_kali_nina (AWESOME stickers)

@ireneista I don’t know what a “polycule” is (and at this point I’m afraid to ask), but we upstreamed support for all Chromebooks over the past 4 years. As of 6.19 you don’t need any downstream patches for x86_64 anymore.

One sticker on my current daily-driver (almost) got me in trouble with airport security in Frankfurt

(I stopped using ELDRID due to instability issues, there’s something wrong with PCIe power circuitry that causes random freezes. I should be able to debug it now since I have an oscilloscope, but didn’t have time to work on it yet).

Irenes (many)Mar 15

@elly nice!!!

Irenes (many)Mar 15

@elly and yeah we'd expect the molotov cocktail art to raise eyebrows

Nina Kalinina Mar 15

@ireneista @elly it'd be funny if it actually was the "cyber" sticker 🫣 people are scared of hackers

Nina Kalinina Mar 15

@elly it's incredible! Freeing affordable laptops is great

Mitsunee Mar 15

@[email protected] @nina_kali_nina that "we bash back" sticker goes so hard, it could only be improved by making it a pun on purpose

dmi 💽 Mar 15

@mitsunee @nina_kali_nina @elly that’s on my laptop! and yes, it’s totally a pun!

WeirdTreeThing Mar 15

@elly @nina_kali_nina you dont even want to see how big my pile of chromebooks is

@nina_kali_nina @elly for extra fun, m.2 can also be wired (and keyed) for sata

Ben Ramsey Mar 15

@nina_kali_nina I had no idea Lenovo made Chromebooks under the ThinkPad brand.

Ein Philosophiker Mar 15

@nina_kali_nina Best linux and bsd devices are 8-15y old lenovo laptops

DefaultKevin 6d ago

@nina_kali_nina I enjoy how usable my circa 2009 Celeron SU2300 laptop is with Debian 13. 4G RAM, 128G SSD. My daughter is much less impressed.

It wouldn't run OpenBSD well; seemed to overwhelm the CPU.