FreeBSD 8.1 RELEASE on Eee Pc 1000HE.
I installed FreeBSD 8.1 on my Eee Pc finally. I've been meaning to do
so for a while now and haven't really been compelled to do so. But my
last version was getting crouded so I decided to do a fresh install.
There were a few system level settings I wanted to change as well, so
I'm glad I did it.
On this page I will document and update all I had to do to get
FreeBSD up and running well. Note, use the EEEKERN and loader.conf
from my last post about 8.0. Those remain the same, to loader.conf I
have added nothing, but cleaned it up. I have a few double values in
there I suggest removing concerning the mouse. Basically everything
below the line stating that the following was generated by
sysinstall.
To start, lets create a device called wlan0 that points to ath0 with
the command:
ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev ath0
(as root.)
Then start up wlan0:
ifconfig wlan0 down
ifconfig wlan0 ssid RouterName
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhclient wlan0
(Thats if you have dhcp on your network [likely], and no password.
For more info on how to use ifconfig read the man page. It's pretty
straight forwards.)
To /boot/device.hints add the lines:
kern.smp.disabled="1"
hint.psm.0.flags="0x2000"
This will fix suspend and resume. It disables the ability to use
multiple processors, which on the Eee PC isn't a problem. (dmesg
claims that the Atom processor is hyperthreaded with 2 threads, which
is also disabled when you disable smp. There is no noticible loss in
preformance as far as I can tell, but I haven't preformed any
benchmarks to confirm this.) To me, the theoretical (and unoticible)
loss of preformace for the added gain of getting suspend and resume
is worth the it. Particularly on a laptop. (furthermore particularly
on one that designed and used to be portible, not powerful.)
The second part was to fix the mouse upon restart which normally
freezes up. Which worked for me, but if that doesn't work for you try
the more
'extream' version by setting the flag to "0x6000". 2000 just sets the
bit that triggers HOOKRESUME which basically sends data to the mouse
in
order to wake it up. 6000 triggers both HOOKRESUME and
INITAFTERSUSPEND
which basically reinitializes all the settings of the mouse upon
wakeing
up from a suspended mode. To just trigger INITAFTERSUSPEND use
"0x4000".
For the 1000HE "0x2000" alone seems to work fine.
So far, with the loader.conf file, the rc.conf file, the EEEKERN file
and the device.hints file updated, most everything is fixed.
add the line:
(normal-erase-is-backspace-mode 1)
to your emacs file. 8.1 will have the new(er) emacs (23.2.1 on mine.)
[With the version of emacs shipped with 8.0 the lines to add are:
(global-set-key [?\C-h] 'backward-delete-char)
(global-set-key [?C-x ?h] 'help-command)
I think, and thats with version 22 or 21 of emacs.]
Was hard for me to find that info for the new emacs, not sure why the
old way wouldn't still work, it seems like it should to me, and it
does on and off, but the way I stated above is more reliable.
I haven't tried ethernet because I have no way to try it, but it
should work. There is no reason for it not to because I can see it as
ale0. You should be able to just do the following:
ifconfig ale0 up
dhclient ale0
If you have dhcp on you network, should work right out of the box as
such.
Beyond that I didn't experiance to many problems. It was a lot faster
for me to get 8.1 up and running then it did for me to get 8.0 up and
running, mainly because it's all pretty much the same stuff, and
lucky for me I documented it. I'll update as I go along.
BTW, check out the window manager called wmii. If you're like me,
someone who likes to use the keyboard more then the mouse and would
much rather type in a program name then hunt it down in a menu,
you'll like it. Also ion is very nice, but the other gave up on the
open source community as a whole and from what I've heard switched
over to the dark side. (same guy that wrote PWM)
I've been using TWM the whole time I had 8.0, but decided to look in
to getting something slightly more modern. I like the plan9 features
and conpatability to wmii, and the simple elegant interface is nice.
Ion3 was very nice as well, for the same reasons, and is more
centered around the keyboard, but wmii won out in the end.
Good luck fellow EeeBSDers. Email me with questions, I'm more then
happy
to help.
P.S. I know I have a few spelling mistakes and grammar errors in here, I
was tired when drafting this up and it's to laggy on my connection to
really edit it from my shell. I did clean it up a bit though. I know
this isn't a step by step guide, I figure most BSD users can follow an
install, this is just a few of those minor details to get the system
running right that the install fails to catch out of the box.