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.