2020-20-29: In Which I Fail To Computer                                      xkp
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I have a really nice Thinkpad X230 with an X220 keyboard running seabios and
coreboot. I thought it would be cool to multiboot it between OpenBSD, Linux,
Plan 9, Haiku and Icaros. Of course life does not work that way.

It currently runs old OpenBSD. I'd be better off reinstalling it than upgrading.

Attempt 1: Icaros!

I went to the Icaros site, downloaded it, dd'd the image onto a USB key,
rebooted the X230 and ... can't boot. No attempt to get it booting would work.

There is a VMWare VM that can be used to create a USB pendrive version of Icaros
which you can then adapt to make an installer USB afterwards but ain't nobody
got time for that.

Attempt 2: Haiku!

Ok Haiku looks cool. I'd like to try it on physical hardware. Looks the most
feature complete of the OSes I'm interested in (Linux and OpenBSD aside).
Reading the docs it turns out that while yes, Haiku does have Libreoffice it
doesn't have a FREAKING PARTITION MANAGER WHAT THE FUCK HAIKU? Ok, that's not
the end of the world. They recommend using the GParted liveCD.

Attempt 2.5: Gparted LiveCD

I go to the site, sourceforge, yuk. Ahh, they don't want you to dd. They want
you to download something called tuxboot and run that. I download and run
tuxboot. Now it wants to download the iso and put it somewhere, so it can dd it
across... Erm... thanks, I think.

Ok, lets boot the Gparted LiveCD off the pendrive and... no bueno.

Ok, lets see if Haiku can boot.

Attempt 2.5.1: Haiku LiveCD

Ok, download the livecd, dd it to the drive, reboot aaand YES! It's booting! No,
wait, it's rebooted back to the Seabios menu. Lets try again. Yes. No. Reboot.

Attempt 3: 9Front

Ok, download the livecd, read the FQA and it looks like there's two approaches.
The simplest is to cat the iso to the drive. Works for me.

Lets boot it. Ok, booting... booting... looks like it's working. And the screen
goes black. Ok, the USB drive light is on. Nope, now it's off. Ok.

Lemme press the power button. Nothing. Lemme hold the power button. Nothing.
Lemme try rebooting. Nope.

Now my X230 won't switch on. To be fair, 9Front's site repeatedly tells people
not to use it, but I didn't have bricking my laptop on boot in mind.

Did Plan 9 kill my laptop? Proably not, but I guess the stars are telling me I
should probably stick to OpenBSD for now.