Productivity Apps for <= 64 MB Computers

This is just a partial shot of sc (console spreadsheet) running in GNU screen on OpenBSD 4.3. With vim and sc and screen, who needs Open Office?

Just Fiddling Around

Haven’t had much time to mess with the ancient box and OpenBSD. I installed some packages, removed some of them, built vim 7.2a-beta from CVS (updated to patch level 8 yesterday), and wrote a few scripts. I also built a few more things from source.

One of the packages I installed and later deleted was zsh. I love zsh. It’s just not all that great on a computer with 64 MB RAM (52 of which are available). I’m back to using ksh, which is much lighter.

Speaking of light, I’m impressed that I’m only using about 650 MB of disk space so far. That’s with the X sets installed (required for some of the stuff I wanted to install that isn’t X-related) plus what I’ve added so far, not to mention files I’ve installed or moved to this computer. I haven’t bothered setting up X yet — not using it as a desktop anyway.

The above shot (partial view) is from a system stats script I wrote this morning.

Still thinking about installing OpenBSD on my laptop. I may shrink one Linux partition to reclaim enough space for it so I can at least try the bwi driver.

Installed OpenBSD 4.3

Just installed OpenBSD 4.3 on a MMX/200 mhz box. No big plans for it yet. The shot was taken on my laptop (Vector Linux, stripped and secured) while shelled in. Just adding a few packages, no ports.

Update, bwi, miscellaneous thoughts

I haven’t updated this blog in quite a while. I ended up reinstalling Damn Small Linux on my quirky desktop computer to see what had changed after reading a fairly negative review and also because I wasn’t able to sort out the issues with ACPI and my floppy in FreeBSD.

In the meantime, there have been more changes both in my Linux and my BSD worlds

I installed OpenBSD 4.2 on my laptop using the new ISO containing the install sets. One of the reasons was to test the malo driver for Marvell Libertas cards. A friend was so impressed with the function of malo that he asked if he could buy my 3Com card and get me to install OpenBSD for him (wuss, RTFM). I got him to throw in a few more things to sweeten the deal and I was out my favorite card.

I had a DLink USB adapter and a Broadcom 4306-based card left. I loaned (I’m beginning to think permanently) the USB adapter to a friend whose vacation is long since over. I decided to install DSL on the laptop and see how well the Broadcom-based card would work. I had only used the Broadcom card in Windows. I’d used the Prism2-based DLink adapter successfully with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and (of course) Windows.

Here’s a summary of what happened next:
I was very unhappy with the limited support for my card with the existing kernel, ndiswrapper version, etc., in DSL. I couldn’t scan at all. I couldn’t connect to hidden SSIDs. I had WEP but no WPA. So I ended up compiling kernels and updating wireless extensions, wireless tools, and ndiswrapper in the process. The problem is there are so many limitations with that in the 2.4 kernel and with gcc — roadblocks with wireless extension (max version 18), ndiswrapper (required new toolchain and gcc), etc. It was a big hassle and I was increasingly sure the results would only be marginal.

By the time I realized I was hitting the wall with what was possible with 2.4, I’d already installed some Linux 2.6-based distros to see if support was much better. It was.

I ended up installing VectorLinux 5.9 on the laptop. I was able to get my card working flawlessly the way I want it to: connect to a hidden SSID, use WPA, and have the ability to scan. Those were things I was unable to do to some degree with DSL before or after my attempt to update wifi support for it.

The silver lining of my frustrating experience is DSL is about to go to kernel 2.6. I’m not at liberty to say much else beyond that. But new hardware support will be much better soon.

Over the last few days, I’ve been looking again at re-installing a BSD as my primary OS on desktop and laptop. I thought I would never get support for my Broadcom card in OpenBSD because of the crap from the Linux/bcm43xx community during the bcw controversy and the decision by Theo to exclude any ndis tool that would require blobs to function.

(The reason I side with OpenBSD over the bcm43xx developers is because the way it was handled: there was no attempt to see if the inclusion of their code in a CVS submission was accidental, as it was. Instead, the accusations were made that it was a deliberate violation and attempt to relicense their code — which it wasn’t. Anyone who’s looked at OpenBSD can sense that they pride themselves on their code. Including OpenSSH, which the Linux distros have been using, often without contributions of code or resources to assist development. As to ndis and the refusal to include a tool to kludge a binary driver, I appreciate and can understand Theo’s decision to draw that line.)

What I’ve recently found has made me happy. DragonFlyBSD now has a module for Broadcom chips. This apparently is like bcm43xx-fwcutter since it requires firmware to be installed — not exactly a native driver, but it’s progress. So I got to looking around to see if this is included with any other BSD. It is. Maybe. According to this man page, bwi will be in OpenBSD 4.3.

I need to do a little more investigating. The DragonFlyBSD man page mentions WPA but the OpenBSD man page only mentions WEP. I also want to see if this is available — or will be — in FreeBSD and NetBSD.

I was hoping to have more time to play with all this today, but I just had a change in plans while writing this. I might get around to it tomorrow. Or Monday evening.

Rolling Along, One Glitch, I’m Happy with My Decision

Most of my computers have been simple to set up with FreeBSD 6.2. The documentation is superb, especially the handbook.

One of my computers is very quirky, though, but I’m getting there. It’s the one I set up to boot without ACPI to see if that would remedy the floppy. Well, that fixed the floppy problem but it’s also caused something else to go awry: now I can’t properly power down. Before I changed to no ACPI, I could run shutdown and then press my power button and it would turn off. Now I run shutdown and pressing the power button reboots the computer. No big deal since I rarely turn it off, but I really hate turning the power off during POST (which is the first chance in the whole sequence I get to use the power button again).

I’ll see if there’s something else I can do about the floppy or find a tweak for ACPI before I decide to live with it (it’ll probably get lengthy uptimes between boots regardless) or without floppies (not exactly a priority). I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get it sorted out. Just not tonight.

The only noticeable performance difference I can tell is GNU screen doesn’t hang when switching around between things and my audio doesn’t stutter when I have stuff compiling. That’s not much of a benchmark and it’s only anecdotal, but watching top while all that was happening leads me to believe that FreeBSD schedules much better than Linux 2.4 (and probably better than 2.6 even though I can’t address it because I remember ever installing 2.6 — just used 2.6 on live CDs).

Over all, I’m pretty happy with how smoothly everything has gone.

Done. Sort of.

FreeBSD 6.2 is now installed on every computer except my XP box (which will eventually get the same “upgrade”) and my old NT hard drive (I have thumb drives with more storage, so why bother?).

More to come later this weekend. Or Monday.

Edited About Page

My “about” page now reflects the fact I no longer have Linux installed on any partition on any hard drive or on any computer or USB thumb drive. The last remaining Linux vestiges are installation and live CDs.

Update: Settling on FreeBSD… Probably

I think I’m finally settling on a FreeBSD-based system without ports or pkgsrc, and just compile what I want to use. I find myself using the same apps and utilities so it makes more sense to me to compile what I want than to add 400 MB of makefiles, etc., I’ll barely use — aside from my own files and audio collection, 400 MB is about all I’m going to have on my system anyway (unless I keep the sources). I still might install ports to “jump start” the installation of dependencies, and there’s about a 10% chance I’ll change my mind and decide on either NetBSD or OpenBSD instead. But I’m leaning pretty firmly in one direction now.

I’ve been running mostly from my FreeBSD 6.0 installed on my laptop and also a transient spare hard drive shuttled between computers ranging from a 100 mhz Pentium to my 1300 mhz Athlon.I installed man pages and ports. From ports, I’ve added GNU screen and mp3blaster (and the dependencies needed to get them up and running). From source, I’ve compiled a few more apps.  GNU screen is mandatory for me. I won’t be installing X. I installed mp3blaster to test FreeBSD with my soundcards.

The only issue I’ve had is with an Intel i810 internal sound card where I got a message (several actually) that loading the meta snd_driver may not have succeeded. But it did, so there’s no issue. All the rest of my sound cards have worked flawlessly — load the driver, voila. I didn’t set up to load specific drivers because I’ve been shuttling around hard drives and didn’t want to have to keep changing drivers. The meta driver will be great if I make any live CDs.

I’m having the same issue I mentioned before with my USB keyboard only working in one port. I can live with that for now. I haven’t tried loading CDCEther in different USB ports yet.

Finally, I haven’t been able to mount a floppy. I get an error message that it’s not configured. I’ll try it with a non-ACPI kernel and see if that does the trick.

I’ll likely upgrade all partitions with clean installs of FreeBSD 6.2 this weekend.

OpenBSD 4.2 ISO Installation

Doh! A day after I installed 4.1 the old-fashioned way, along comes OpenBSD’s new single ISO.

New Installation ISO Files in 4.2:

Now that the install sets are included in the installXY.iso image file, the single ISO file can be downloaded for the installation process. Previously with the cdXY.iso image files, you would also need to download the install sets separately (either to a local mirror or during the installation).

Yes, All Three

Progress! Got everything set up this weekend. I initially was going to set up my computers on NetBSD. I decided, after some discussion, to install NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on different hard drives so I can switch them between computers and get an assessment of which works best with which hardware. With one exception, all are set up with pkgsrc. The one exception is a FreeBSD install with ports.

Everything has gone very smoothly save for a couple minor issues. One was with NetBSD and ethernet over USB while using a USB keyboard. The USB keyboard only works in one port (what’s up with that?). That’s the same one ethernet wants to use (what’s up with that?!). Not a big issue (more a matter of convenience), so I’m just using a standard NIC. No idea if the mouse wants that port, too, but it doesn’t matter since I don’t have plans to install X on any partition.

The second issue is the time required for compiling source on a RAM-challenged, slow CPU machine. Nothing that time won’t cure in the short term (if the electricity stays on). Short term is relative; I know it wouldn’t take so long if it weren’t a spanking fresh install with all kinds of dependencies to meet. The long-run fix for that is using binaries or a combination of more patience and less coffee.

I’m pressed for time and the lights are flickering (storm), so I’ll post impressions of installing and setting up each this week.