Asus Eee PC 701 4G: Installing NetBSD
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- Due to viewer interest in keeping these beautiful machines alive, a walkthrough of the installation of #NetBSD - a classical Unix OS - is shown. It suits the #Asus #Eee PC 701 4G well, leaving you with about two gigabyte free, and this video shows some of the hurdles one may experience while installing - and how to overcome them; basic install, getting WiFi going (using a TP Link TL-WN722N wireless module), installing sample binary packages (i.e. avoiding compilation from source) and configuring X11 are shown. - (Also, this channel is now switching to a biweekly schedule.)
Thank you so much for the video, the level of care and attention to detail during all that fiddly installation process is something to be praised about!
...might have finally found a use for my doorstop of an Eee Pc. Thank you. :)
I have to be honest: I've worked with a number of people who seem to be hooked on BSD, some of whom are quite happy proclaiming their dislike for Linux. I have to say after looking at this setup, it's very, very reminiscent of the first time I set up Slackware on my old laptop. The two are just very, very alike. I understand sticking to what you're comfortable with/what you know, but realistically, now that ZFS is available on both, I'd say you can give someone a clean Slackware install or BSD system, alias the package manager commands and it'll be quite tricky to tell the two apart.
Well, the irony is, BSDs have a "Linux subsystem" of sorts (SUSE & RHEL derived, in the past), optionally installable to help with some apps' compatibility (in the past, notably Openoffice & Skype) - so yes, some BSD people "hate Linux" indeed, but it is somewhat hypocritical from this perspective. However, from all the Linux installation experiences, yes, I concur, Slackware is most BSD-like - and Gentoo exactly seeks to imitate NetBSD's pkgsrc (which, at some point or another, was also used by Minix, IllumOS, MacOS etc IIRC). I try here to stay away from ideology - and treat both Linux and BSD simply as mature and interesting Unixoids. 😊
@@ninoivanov that's cool. I think we're pretty much of the same mindset here. I've been thinking of running a flavour of BSD on one of my old laptops (hence my checking out this video). The installer and setup just reminded me of slackware from the ncurses based UI all the way to the teenage me reading man pages on wpa_supplicant etc... slackware got me hooked on Linux because once it was all up and running, I felt like I just "understood" my system, if something wasn't working, I knew which config files to edit and so on... Based on this, I just think BSD is a similar vibe. Kind of like I use Vim for everything, while others swear by Emacs. I often joke with my Emacs brethren about how telling it is that Emacs has the best vim emulation (evil mode), but at the end of the day: they're just as efficient in Emacs as I am with Vim. It's all about what you're used to and what you want from your system. Both are mature, feature complete, and incredibly powerful tools, just like you said Linux and BSD are both mature *NIX systems.
Very nice. I have two eeepcs, one with a 4GB SSD no less. NetBSD is a bit too spartan for my taste, I am sticking to FreeBSD (also using wired ethernet, I think the builtin wifi never worked but I may give it another try)
I had one of mine with NetBSD 9 and the wifi worked fine.
I have that horrible P.O.S to, such a extremely bad keyboard! Mine is running puppylinux, somewhat used to emulated Amiga.
Keyboard was usable, but that trackpad was really annoying to use.
Tastes differ... 😊
you are good
Kindly thank you! :)
Uggh… the 701 was ewaste in 2007, and they haven’t gotten any better in the last 17 years. There are later netbooks (Eee PC 1215b, for example) based on processors like the AMD E-350, that have dual 64bit K10 cores, a real GPU (still capable of running a modern compositing display server) and support for enough RAM to run a modern Linux distro. They’re slow by any measure, but not Dothan Celeron slow.
I get that you can put NetBSD on something like this, but what are you going to do with it? The screen is too small to make it useful as a graphical thin client, it doesn’t support enough memory to make it run a browser capable of rendering modern sites, it’s too slow for all but the most basic emulation tasks, and you can’t really use it for any home server workloads due to the limited network bandwidth and storage options. And even if you could use it for home server tasks, it’s comparatively power inefficient versus a RaspberryPi 3 or 4 (and quite a bit slower).
Personally, I don’t get why people are still into these machines, other than there being a hobbiest group for everything nowadays. Yes the 700/701 kicked off the short-lived Netbook craze, but that’s about all they did (and in the process, generated a mountain of ewaste). But hey, to each their own, I guess.
"What it shall be used for" will be demonstrated all too clearly in many of the coming videos on this channel... You will soon see, things here are going to be about fancy affairs - not "speed". ;) You will see here in the coming years things unseen since the 1980s - and a couple of things never seen before - and yes, involving the Asus Eee PC 4G... ;)
I get your point, but that rpi3 might need display and input devices for many uses too. I suppose these could still be usable as stationary home automation monitoring, octoprint etc.
@@ninoivanov Well as a collector of novel vintage hardware (and someone whose first machine was a Vic20) you’ve got my sub to see what you’re gonna do with this old machine. I might be cynical about the Eee PC, but not about making it do interesting things.
You'll laugh, but mine runs Linux and I like to play a round of NetHack with it. It's a perfect machine for that.
@@smakfu1375 to think of it I still know few car enthusiast that use nettops of the era for Windows XP and car diagnostic software as random use beater laptops. They're really nicely sized hardware for such "offline" old software stuff. Though yeah there's a lot of better options than 1st gen eee's for that. I kinda still miss those computers. Now would be great time to reintroduce similar type hardware that would be vastly more usable. But they were quite fun toys. Most I've learned about Linux ever trying to install stuff like Arch or make any distro semi usable in them. I had the worst of the worst 2g model 1st gen eee. It was very limited even at the beginning 🙂
What a way to turn a serviceable netbook to a useless toy.
As you seem to so strongly dissent - what would it have been that you would have done, how would you have "serviced" it?
@@ninoivanovWould leave with XP, of course.
But for space reasons, you either must stick with SP2 or have a cut-down SP3, and you have nowadays only weirdo browsers… That said, I have one with XP, too, but objectively, the Unixoids keep more options open. Then again, an XP retro book is not without charme…
You can't be serious, any up to date system is more useful than XP in this day and age
@@tylerdean980And what you gonna do with your 'up to date' system? Run vi in 6 tiled windows?