Asus eee (was Re: G4 Quicksilver as Web Server?)

[Manolis Kiagias]

Matthias Apitz wrote:
> El día Friday, January 18, 2008 a las 10:41:28PM -0500, Garance A Drosehn escribió:
>
>   
>> At 9:14 AM -0500 1/2/08, Ed Maste wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 06:20:22PM +0000, James Jeffery wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Before i end the toipic, anyone got any feeback on the Asus Eee (mini
>>>> laptops) with FreeBSD?
>>>>         
>>> It works, but no drivers exist for the wireless or wired Ethernet ports.
>>> The wireless is a newer Atheros part and ath(4) should gain support for
>>> it, but I have no idea what the timeline will be.  The wired Ethernet
>>> is an Atheros (formerly Attansic) L2 10/100, and I'm not aware of any
>>> concrete plans for a driver for it.
>>>
>>> I've used a Linksys USB200M USB ethernet (axe(4) driver) with mine and
>>> that works well.
>>>       
>> One of the guys I know is running FreeBSD on the Eee, and has written
>> up the following information for anyone who is interested in doing
>> what he did:
>>
>>         http://nighthack.org/wiki/EeeBSD
>>
>> This includes tips on how to get the wireless working, and sound,
>> and some oddities with how X11 works.
>>     
>
> Thanks for that hint. I'm thinking in buying such a device to have it
> with me as a typewriter, mostly; normally I use FreeBSD 7.0-REL on my
> laptop with around 200 compiled ports: KDE, OpenOffice, Lyx, StarDict,
> ...
> the compilation normally takes 2-3 days to have it all ready;
>
> of course, on that limited device with 4 or 8 GByte SSD it is not an
> option to compile the stuff up from /usr/ports on the system itself, not
> only from the point of view of disk space, but also because of the limited
> lifetime write cycles of the SSD;
>
> in short: what would be the easiest way to move the installed ports from
> my laptop to such an Eee PC? can I make, for example, packages from my
> ports and install them?
>
> Thx
>
> 	matthias
>
>   
[Sending this a second time to the list only, since it had too many 
recipients the first time and was probably rejected]

I happen to have an eeePC and have successfully installed FreeBSD on it. 
It can be done in various ways (even without a CDROM, if you have an 
external USB disk).
I can attest the instructions in nighthack.org work: Sound and wireless 
work fine. There are a few things you can do it to speed it up:

- The SSD is too small for the classic partitioning scheme of FreeBSD. 
Probably a large '/' partition or a '/' and '/home' will do. Do not use 
swap.
- Turn of logging (syslogd_enable="NO" in /etc/rc.conf)
- Edit /etc/ttys and reduce the number of virtual terminals.  You 
probably don't need them.
- Do not compile anything on the eee. It wil be a test of its abilities 
and your patience. Compile the kernel on another a PC and copy it via a 
USB key. Either use ready made packages (possibly after setting 
PACKAGESITE to packages-7-stable) or use 'make package' on your main pc 
to create packages and transfer them.
- The eee will happily run X and any environment you choose. I have 
tried XFCE and GNOME with no problem. More memory will be better, but 
not absolutely necessary.
- As others have said, the wired LAN does not currently work.
- Note you can install either to SSD or an external SDHC. The SSD is 
somewhat faster though. (But you can get larger SDHCs). I am dual 
booting Linux and FreeBSD on mine right now. Linux is on the SSD and 
FreeBSD on an 8GB SDHC.