Episode: 3418
Title: HPR3418: My gEeeky Experiment - Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3418/hpr3418.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:59:47

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3418 for Wednesday,
the 8th of September 2021. To its show is entitled,
My Geeky Experiment, Part 2. It is hosted by Claudio Miranda and is about 11 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is Claudio talks about how he installed Haku on an SSEE
PC 900A, received from a friend. This episode of HPR is brought to you by
An Honesthost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15. Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hey everyone, this is Claudio Miranda, also known as Claudio M on Macedon and IRC and other
online sites. I wanted to record this episode where I'm following up with my last episode which
was entitled My Geeky Experiment and in that one I had talked about taking my old ASUS EPC 901
netbook and putting OpenBSD on it. On this one I'm going to take another netbook of the same
family that was sent to me by a friend sometime in early 2020 late 2019 or on there and it's an
ASUS EPC 900A which is the predecessor to the 901. Cosmatically they do look different and I think
the 901 had some changes to address issues with the 900A's design but internally they're exactly
the same thing. So this time around I wanted to install HIKU or the HIKU operating system onto the
900A. So if you're not familiar with HIKU, HIKU is an operating system that is the open source
continuation of the B operating system also known as BOS. Now BOS was actually created by a company
in the 90s called B-Ink which was founded by Jean-Louis Guesset who was actually actually worked
at Apple prior to starting that company and they created the BOS. They actually had their own
computer they called it the B box and it initially had the AT&T Hobbit CPUs but eventually they
moved over to the PowerPC 603 and as time passed they started supporting the the Power Macintosh
clones that came out and as a matter of fact I actually have a Motorola StarMax 4000 mini tower
which has it has a 160 megahertz PowerPC 604E and that one is running BOS R5 5.0.3. So I'm going to
post the I'm going to in the show notes I'll post a video of that running and booting up
along with links to the HIKU website and the Wikipedia pages for HIKU BOS and
and being incorporated. So back to the topic of hand so I wanted to go ahead and put HIKU
on this netbook so I downloaded a nightly that they have on the download page for HIKU
and I went ahead and I proceeded to do the installation I put it onto a USB flash drive
booted up off of that flash drive on the netbook and I was presented with the installer for HIKU
and it's super simple I just went ahead and using an app that that comes with the installation
called Drive Setup to blow away whatever was on the drive itself on the E and prepare it so
that I can install HIKU on this. So once I did that I proceeded with the installation all the
included packages were installed and within few minutes later I was able to reboot and get
this thing running HIKU. So a couple of things that I didn't notice with this.
As quick and easy as it was to do I had some issues with the post installation if you will.
For one the trackpad which is an Elantec trackpad on the 900A it worked I can move the mouse around
but I couldn't use the buttons. So I think the only way it would register is if I did it like a touch
click but everything else the right clicking and all that did not work so I actually had to plug
into a USB mouse to get to the files and folders and all that and the applications. Now when I
checked to see how it was detected how the trackpad was detected I noticed that it was detected as a
PS2 mouse. So I figured well let me check and see on HIKU Depot which is their package manager
for the HIKU applications and I looked to see if there was a driver package for that trackpad
but I could not find anything. I couldn't find the driver package for any trackpad as a matter of
fact so I just dealt with the having to use a USB mouse sorry. The other issue that I noticed was
that it didn't detect the resolution correctly on this netbook. Now the highest resolution
the maximum resolution you can get on this netbook is 1024x600. The only way I could get it to
display properly was if I set it to 800 by 600 because if I did it by 1024 if I did it at 1024
by 600 it wouldn't it wouldn't it wouldn't set the resolution for the entire screen and would
cut off the screen so it was weird it was it was a video glitch on that nightly release of HIKU for
this thing. Fortunately the Wi-Fi did work so I was able to update packages and download some other
packages just to test out aren't. Now the reason why I wanted to put HIKU on this is because given
that BOS was known for its multimedia capabilities I figured well this is the continuation of that so
maybe I can test some things out with my synth I got a Yamaha synth that has the full ADA keys
and the the EPC both the 901 and the 900A are small enough that they sit right on the top of the
panel right right above the keys themselves so it fits perfectly not not like my other laptop which
kind of is too big for it to be on there it can sit on it but I get a little nervous so but
this is perfect it just sits perfectly right there and just to test some apps so the good thing is
that I can just plug it in with a USB cable since the synthesizer itself has a USB port so I
don't have to fiddle around with a a USB to MIDI adapter and then you know I just connect it
directly so that was that's not the not what I had hoped to be the result on this netbook
but that was a while back that was like I said early 2020 and just recently the HIKU team released
R1 beta 3 so I said let me give it a try now and see what's changed if anything's changed or not
so I downloaded that went through the whole song and dance of creating the USB and and booting off
that and I went ahead and installed it I blew away what it had on there since I didn't really use
it for anything and installed R1 beta 3 now the changes were that the screen resolution this time
was properly detected and set at 1024 by 600 which made a world of difference I had more screen
resolution a desktop space I had it was just an all-around better experience previous versus before
the before this release of the browser called web positive were very buggy and unstable but in
this release actually was very good very stable and I was even even able to load discord and
mess it on on on web positive and there were a few glitches there were like the button icons
wouldn't show up on the pages but I'm sure the the HIKU team will address that in future releases
during the nightlies again the only drawback I came across with this was once again the trackpad
it was still detected as a ps2 mouse and the button still did not work so I'll have to continue
using a a USB mouse with this for the time being however I do want to look at probably installing
HIKU on my 901 because I am actually looking at replacing the 901 with something that's
not as it's just as small it's an 11.6 inch notebook but it comes with a third generation i5
or a third generation i7 CPU so that would put me in the 64-bit camp so that I can run open
BSD on that and that laptop is the HP Elite book 2170P so a little bit down the road I'm
going to try and see if I can get that and that will be my go-to for taking a work and whatnot but
and that way I can move all my stuff from the 901 over to that and put HIKU on the 901 itself since
it has the full two gigs of RAM now to be honest you really don't need that much RAM with HIKU
this 900A only has one gig and it's still blazingly fast so I'll put all the links in the show notes
talking about HIKU and the history of HIKU and BOS and all that along with a couple of other things
I'll even put the link to my blog post that talks about this with the exception of the R1 beta 3
installation so that you guys can look it over anyway thanks for listening I hope you enjoyed
this and be on the lookout for part three where I talk about how I perform some upgrades on my 901
anyways if you get a chance please record an episode for Hacker Public Radio we're always in
need of shows and you don't have to be a fancy podcaster or anything just recorder show on your
phone about something that interests you and even if you think nobody's going to be interested
trust me there's always something that is of interest to hackers on Hacker Public Radio I hope
to hear from one of your episodes soon and and uh well you will hear from me soon so take care
have a good one bye bye
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