One week with FreeBSD 13 on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 - Part One ============================================================= Last edited: $Date: 2021/07/11 08:48:19 $ Solene's Challenge ------------------ Solene posted a challenge on her website https://dataswamp.org/~solene and on Mastodon. It is the so called The Old Computer Challenge, see https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer- challenge.html. The point of the challenge is to replace your daily computer by a very old computer. For this, I got nostalgic, and got my old faithful Acer Aspire One ZG5 from the attic. ### Acer Aspire One ZG5 The Acer Aspire One ZG5 is a first generation Acer Aspire and came to the market as a EEE PC competitor. This machine comes with an Atom processor, 8 Gb solid state storage and 512 Mb RAM, 802.11b/g wireless network and a 10/100 Ethernet port. The screen is 1024x600 8.9 inch TFT panel. The keyboard is not a full size keyboard, due to the small form factor of the laptop. The laptop has two SD-card slots, which on the original Linpus Linux version could be used as an extension of the 8 Gb on board storage. #### Crippled by Microsoft Netbooks from this period, like this Aspire, are all crippled because of Microsoft. In the era of the netbook, Microsoft came up with some crazy requirements for netbooks, like too low RAM-size ceiling and a not too capable CPU. OEM manufacturers had to comply, to be allowed to put a less expensive netbook-version of Windows on it. #### Power cable only Unfortunately, my Aspire One will only run with the power cable attached, the machine is not capable anymore to load the battery. Before moving this laptop to the attic some years ago, I tried it with a different battery, but with the same result. First contact ------------- Although this netbook has been my daily driver for several years, it needed some TLC. There was an old, outdated Debian version on it, so that had to be replaced. For fun, I tried to put FreeBSD 13 on it. So I downloaded the i386 memstick image and installed that. It turned out that the WiFi chip actually works on FreeBSD, as far as I know this was a no-go in the heydays of the Aspire. After the memstick installer has done its job, I installed tmux, Xorg, the ratpoison window manager, ratmen and git (ratmen is a better version of ratmenu). This seemed to take forever, writing to the local storage is really, really s-l-o- w. ### Display When everything is installed, I started up X and looked at the nice and friendly TWM window manager. I had to set up my .xinitrc to get ratpoion started. It turn out that Xorg sets this display at 800x600. So, there is something in the FreeBSD setup that I have to change, to get a proper 1024x600 display. Day one ------- ### Problems, problems I booted the Acer and now there are a ton of disk errors. Not happy. I tried to put my home directory in ram-disk (a.k.a. memory file system), but it turned out that the writing of fstab failed, and the laptop totally locked. After a reboot it turned out that fstab had completely disappeared. So, with the installer memstick I created a new fstab (ed is your friend), with the disk in read only mode and home in ram-disk. I renamed my home directory and created a new one, as a mount point for the ram-disk. I rebooted and was able to work for about an hour. This way I could work for about an hour on this machine. Then the disk-activity LED kept burning permanently, and the machine froze. After a reboot it didn't get up anymore, only long list of disk errors. The BIOS doesn't have an option to disable the SSD. So this was the end of the game. Day two ------- ### Open heart surgery It seems that the broken SSD prevented the Acer from booting, and like this it was nothing more than a nostalgic paper weight. So, I decided to see if I could disconnect the SSD from the motherboard. With the aide of ifixit.com I tried to disassemble the laptop. See https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Acer+Aspire+One+ZG5+Hard+Drive+Replacement/3784 Unfortunately, two tiny screws at the back of the laptop, under the battery, didn't came loose and from now on will never get loose, unless by excessive use of sheer power. So I wasn't able to completely disassemble the laptop, but I could lift the topsite just far enough to get my fingers in and, gambling that I had the right connector, removed the ribbon from what I thought was the connector of the SSD. With the keyboard and trackpad still disconnected, and everything still open, I inserted the bootable USB stick, connected the power and started the laptop. It booted! So that was great news, I had indeed disconnected the SSD and not some other component. From another machine I logged on over SSH and halted the laptop again. After this I tried to assemble everything, but was worried about the ribbons of the keyboard and trackpad. I tried to reconnect these ribbons, but felt very unsure if I had did this right. So, with the keyboard still loose and almost in its right place, I booted again to test the connections. Both the keyboard and trackpad worked :) After this, I halted the laptop again and put everything in place. This almost succeeded: there is one tiny screw left. I again booted the machine, tested the keyboard and trackpad. Result: surgery has succeeded, we do have a working laptop. ### Back in business So, now the Acer is back in business again and the game of the user config starts again, so configuring ratpoison, xterminal, and so on. This are the first packages that I installed, according to `pkg query -e '%a = 0' %o | sort`: devel/rcs editors/emacs misc/unclutter ports-mgmt/pkg sysutils/tmux www/lynx www/w3m x11-wm/ratmen x11-wm/ratpoison x11/xorg x11/xterm After having installed these packages, the total number of installed packages is 211. Welcome to the wonderful world of dependencies. What the list above doesn't show, it that I had actually installed emacs-nox, otherwise the total number of installed packages would be a lot higher. ### Display After toying around I finally got the display in X to 1024x600. This involved installing another number of packages, like drm-kmod, gpu-firmware-kmod, and adding my user to the 'video' group. ### Firefox I also installed Firefox. Another load of packages, but did turn out to be a big mistake. Firefox is way to heavy for this laptop (I guess both because of the limited amount of RAM as well as the lack of CPU power). So, I try to get around with lynx, w3m and eww. ### Weather "prahou" on the libera.chat channel #old-computer-challenge came with `curl http://wttr.in/Berlin`, in which you can replace Berlin with the name of another city. This is a nice solution for a ancient laptop :) ### Packages After installing Git, Firefox, Neofetch and some stuff to finally get the display to the native resolution, the counter now stands on 347. I haven't installed Libreoffice, LaTeX and all that, I don't expect those to be useable on this machine. More to follow!