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Old 1st April 2016
styr styr is offline
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Default Asus Eee PC 900 and Acer Aspire One ZG5

Here goes my first post!

Hopefully people will find this useful despite the age of these platforms. Although they only have a fraction of the power of modern machines, they still can do a lot when running efficient lightweight software. NetBSD really works well on these compared to many alternatives, at least for the odd tasks that I have used them for.

I recently inherited some old-ish (but barely used) netbooks from some relatives who have since started drinking the Apple Kool-Aid.

One is an Asus Eee PC 900 preinstalled with a stripped-down custom Xandros Linux.

The other is an Acer Aspire One ZG5 preinstalled with Windows XP Home (way past EOL).

The software on both is horribly outdated, but the hardware is in great shape, upgradable, and seems more than capable for meeting my needs with modern Unix-like operating systems.

Grabbing the first three available live distributions I could find (Kali Linux, Jibbed NetBSD, FuguIta OpenBSD), I took these out for a spin. Gladly, all of them run well with solid performance and minimal bugs.

I was going to ask some questions about obscure network functionality in NetBSD, but I eventually figured it out. IMO, Jibbed NetBSD by far had the best overall network setup, where everything would "just work" right out of the box (some unusual networks had some issues with wpa_supplicant, but Jibbed/NetBSD came preinstalled with the right samples to work even in those environments, so I got it working everywhere without undue trial and error).

As a topic for the OpenBSD forum, FuguIta networking would have worked almost as well out of the box, although it forces some manual configuration and manual fetching and loading of wireless drivers, ostensibly for licensing reasons (probably because they are only available as binary blobs). Getting the wireless driver to work at all on Linux was a real PITA at first, but once that was up, it came with NetworkManager to handle the rest smoothly. That may be a good thing to bundle with later/other releases of Jibbed NetBSD if feasible.

ACPI support seemed partially working on the ZG5, but it did not work right for reboot or shutdown (I didn't try suspend). Oddly enough, for the Linux-based Eee PC 900, the modern NetBSD install supported ACPI better than the modern Linux.

Both netbooks have at least one built-in reader for card media, which work under Linux, but do not fully work under NetBSD. NetBSD detects the reader in the Eee PC 900, but it doesn't seem to detect the media. I don't recall it detecting anything in the ZG5.

Also, NetBSD has full support for the ZG5 trackpad, in case that matters to anyone. None of the other live distros had that. Full trackpad support was not available for the Eee PC 900 with anything I tried other than the native Xandros installation.

I can post some dmesg output and other specs if anyone is interested, but for now, I can report that NetBSD (at least NetBSD 7.0 from Jibbed) is alive and well on these versatile netbook platforms.

{I may eventually update the laptop thread on the OpenBSD forum here. That thread already has both machines, but the posts are old and lack some hardware support that is now present in OpenBSD at least as of 5.8.}

HTH
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