Episode: 3383
Title: HPR3383: My gEeeky Experiment - Part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3383/hpr3383.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:27:40

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3383 for Wednesday, the 21st of July 2021.
Today's show is entitled, My Geeky Experiment, Part 1.
It is hosted by Claudio Miranda and is about 17 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is Claudium Talks about how he revived his lowly SSEDPC 901 network with opens.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hey everyone, this is Claudio Miranda, aka Claudio M on the Internets.
I'm recording this episode of Hacker Public Radio because it's been a while since I've done so, so...
Ken, here's my submission.
Anyway, I wanted to record an episode on some of my experience that I've had with my old ASUS EPC 901.
Now, if you aren't very familiar with the ASUS EPC line of computers, these are a series of netbooks that came around.
It started around 2007 and kind of continued along for a few years after that.
Most of them actually had an Intel atom processor, a very low power and in some instances, most instances,
a low performance processor, but it did the job for what it was meant to be.
It was supposed to be just a device for basic internet use, but a lot of people started wiping
the internal operating systems and putting their own Linux distributions or preferred Linux
distributions on them at the time, and after a while, the distros started including support for the
all the various components inside of them. I wasn't so much into the BSDs at the time, but I would
imagine a little after that they probably went ahead and added support for it.
So, I've had this device for a long time. I've had it for about 10 years more, so maybe at this point.
And it's been in and out of use as the years have progressed, especially since I've switched.
That used to be my main, my daily driver for a long time, and then I switched from that to a
Toshiba Portage M400, which I ran Linux on for a while, before I upgraded to the HP Probook 4540S
with a Core i3 processor. And I stopped using my ASUS. I had actually LeBoon2,
was it 14.10. As a matter of fact, I actually have a series of blog posts, which I'm going to turn
into a series of episodes for Hacker Public Radio. And it's called My Geeky Experiment,
except Geeky is spelled with three E's as you would see on the EPC name. So, I'll post a link to
part one of that, which is what I'll be talking about. I'll put that in the show notes. So, yeah,
so I had this EPC for a long time, the 901. And I went ahead and I pulled it out of storage.
I said, well, I still have this thing. Let me give it a try. It had, yeah, now I'm looking at the
post right now. It had LeBoon2, 14.10, which was the last OS I ran on it. But I had stopped using
it because it was giving me some problems. As a matter of fact, the, I think it would just
kernel panic or something, something wouldn't load right. I wasn't getting the the login
screen. So, I just kind of set that aside with the intention of getting back to it and trying to
troubleshoot what was wrong with it. And then I completely forgot about it. And then just life
got in a way, whatever. But anyway, I decided to pull it out and see if I could probably get it
back to life, get it working again. So, I went ahead and I plugged it in and low and behold.
This was sometime, let me see when was this. This was about last year, sometime around last year.
Yeah, I'm looking at blog posts. It's January 4th, 2020 when I did this. I decided to give it another
go. So, yeah, I went ahead and I pulled this device out from, from storage and I want to have
plugged it in and yeah, it started crashing and it just kind of kernel panic and nothing was
working. So, I said, let me try something. I went in, opened it up, kind of receded everything,
receded the RAM, receded the secondary, internal SSD that it has because the one I have actually
has two SSDs. Or what I thought was actually, I'm getting ahead of myself here. It has a 4GB
internal and a 16GB removable SSD. Now, just a bit of a spoiler here. I came to find out
later on that the 4GB internal wasn't soldered. Asus kind of just referred to it as just internal.
So, I just assumed that it was not replaceable. But apparently you can replace that and I'll get
into the details on a later episode on this. So, yeah, I went ahead and receded the 16GB
removable SSD or at least the easily removable SSD from the bottom of the device.
And I said, well, let me recede all this and then after I went ahead and did that,
I said, let me turn it back on and see if I can get open BSD. I was already big into the BSDs.
I played around with free BSD for a while. Then I played around with Open BSD and I fell in love
with Open BSD as everybody pretty much knows at this point. But if you don't, now you do. And so,
yeah, I went ahead and I installed, I prepared a Open BSD installation USB disk because there's no
way to do it from an optical drive on that device. So, I went ahead and I turned it on and right after
I turned it on, I realized just receding everything got the operating system working and the
Lubuntu that was on there. So, I was at least happy that was working and I went ahead and just kind
of logged in to take a look kind of a nostalgic view of it. And it was working fine, you know,
obviously by 2020 standards. Of course, it's right now the date is July 11th, 2021. So, it's been
about a year and a half since this experiment was done. And yeah, given what we've all been through
for the past year and a half, I don't think anybody saw this coming by the time I posted this. But
anyway, going back to what I was saying. So, I decided to, after I played around with Lubuntu for
a while, I decided to reboot it and install Open BSD, which at the time was 6.6. So, I went ahead
and decided to install it and everything surprisingly, surprisingly went through just fine. The
installation process on Open BSD is very simple. It's very Spartan. The only thing you might get hung
up on is the partitioning. I think FDISC is the tool used to perform the partitioning. That could
be wrong. If anybody knows or wants to correct me, you can go ahead and post in the comment section.
But yeah, that was about it. Once you kind of grasp how that works, it's pretty much a straightforward
install. It's very simple, very quick. It'll install the base sets depending on which installation
image you download. I usually get the one that says install and the version number of Open BSD,
which brings all the sets included. But you can do either one. I think there's a net install
of some sort. But if you go to OpenBSD.org website, you can pretty much find out from there when
you go to the downloads page. Anyway, so I went through the install and I booted it up.
I had a feeling that maybe something wouldn't work on it, but to my surprise,
everything pretty much worked. The Wi-Fi was working. The disks were detected just without any
issues. I didn't have any problems with the corruption or whatever. It loaded up. I went ahead and
logged in because I installed it with the ZenoDM ZenoCara graphics X server. Of course, ZenoDM
is the login manager that comes by default. Once you log in, you're presented with
FVWM as the default window manager. It looks pretty nice or ramped pretty nice. I was happy to get
this machine working again. Once I did that, I actually copied the configuration files over from
my Toshi by the time, which I've since retired. That one was running OpenBSD for a good while. I've
switched that one now. I moved the hard drive over to an old, probably a newer, I would say,
because the M400 Toshiba had a Quartu Duo processor. This machine that it's the hard drive
is running on now is a latitude E6410 from Dell, which has a, I think, it's a first generation
Core i5. It's here right now. Give me a sec. I'll look at it later. I believe it is. It's an M520,
so I don't know if it's an i5 or an i3, regardless. That is now on there. I copied the configuration
files from the Toshi by the time over to the, to the netbook, to the EPC. And there's a procedure
for doing that. It has to, you have to use package ad. I don't remember the commands off the top
of my head, but yeah, I mean, you can, if you go into the OpenBSD handbook and there's a section
on installing packages. And if you need to install the same set of packages over to another OpenBSD
machine, there's a procedure there. I'll put them in the show notes. So yeah, I went ahead and
copied that over. Did the package ad magic. And I was up and running with fluxbox as my default
desktop. There's no way I was going to run anything else because this is a machine that the EPC is
a machine that only maxes at two gigs of RAM plus the SSD that it has the 16 gig. Along with the
internal one, the four gig internal one is super, super slow. But it did the job and it was running
nicely. And I had fluxbox running with my themes and all my other settings, my other config files,
and all as well. Now, as far as performance, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. I think
it performed better with OpenBSD in fluxbox than it did with even LeBoon2. But of course, I was
running Mate desktop on that at the time. So it's, it's, it's a lot more of a demand on the system.
So I decided to go with something smaller. But it ran pretty well. I'll go ahead and include a
video also that I did of the of the EPC in action. I had MPV running playing a an internet
radio stream that I listened to. And I don't remember what else. I'll have to catch the video. But
yeah, it actually performed quite well. Now, and everything worked right out of the box.
The only thing that didn't work, of course, is Bluetooth. And the only reason that wasn't
working is because OpenBSD does not support Bluetooth. Now, there is a supposed work around to
that. If you use a USB audio dongle that or I'm sorry, a Bluetooth USB dongle, that apparently
is a workaround to get Bluetooth working on on an OpenBSD machine. So just something to keep in mind.
But yeah, I was very happy with it. And really, all I'm using it for now is I use Firefox on it.
At this point, it's running at the time when I installed it, it was OpenBSD 6.6, which I then
switched over to to follow the current snapshots. But right now, it's running 6.9 current.
And from what I've been told, Firefox, I still haven't installed, but it hasn't upgraded at all
because it's been removed from the I-386 OpenBSD tree. From what I was told, it has something to do
with Rust not compiling, or the new Firefox version not compiling because of some issues with Rust
on 32-bit. So going forward, it looks like with OpenBSD 7 and with the current snapshots,
it's just 64-bit for Firefox. Or any Mozilla-based browser. Which means you're stuck with browsers
like Midori or Links. Some of the webkit browsers are the options you'll have there. But for what I
use it for, which is SSH to SDF, and just SSH to other machines here so I can get on IRC.
It's a great little machine. I don't really need it to do much. It just needs to do the basics.
And that's good for me. So if you have an old netbook lying around and wondering what you want to do
with it, go ahead and just see about dropping an operating system on there. You can try one of the
current links this shows, although they might be a little heavy. But I'd highly recommend a BSD.
There really a lot, I don't want to say a lot easier. But if you're familiar with Linux, I think you
should, you'll do all right with a BSD. There are a lot of differences with regards to the lower
level stuff. But once you get used to it and how things work, the user line is pretty much
all the same for the most part. So yeah, this is going to be my first episode back in a while.
And hopefully, sometime soon, I'll go ahead and look because I had actually a friend of mine
sent me an EPC 900A. He asked me if I was interested. I was like, yeah, sure. I'll take it and
I'll put something else on that. So I got that and I went ahead and I installed high coup on it.
So that one I'll leave for another episode. That will be part two as a matter of fact. That's part two
of my geeky experiment. But yeah, for part one, I managed to get this thing back in use. So I take
it with me every day to work. I use it just as H to certain things. As far as Firefox or at least
the last Firefox that it runs, I can run it. But I would say, you know, if you're going to do so,
stick to maybe one or two tabs. And even with that loading, it's going to be pretty slow on
today's web. But for anything static or even for accessing Gemini capsules, it's a perfect machine.
So if you don't need the overhead of today's web and you want to stick with less intensive
technologies like IRC, SSAH, or even text browsing, it's definitely a great machine and you can
bring some new life into that old netbook if you still have it. Anyway, that's going to be it for
me. I hope you enjoy it. If you have any comments, be sure to leave it in the comments section of this
episode once it's posted. As far as I'm concerned, if you want to get in touch with me also,
you can contact me on mastodon. My mastodon handle is at Claudio M at mastodon.sdf.org. I've
since moved from the mastodon.xyz. So feel free to hit me up there. Also, you can catch me
on my email and my email is Claudio at linuxpacement.com. Anyway, thanks again and be sure to record
some episodes for Hacker Public Radio. Catch you again soon for the next episode in this series. Bye-bye.
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