OpenBSD 5.7 on Acer Aspire One D250
In this blog, I will give an overview of my experience installing/using OpenBSD 5.7-RELEASE (i386) on an AAO-D250 netbook. So please keep in mind that this is not a tutorial or a how-to, even though installing OpenBSD on any device is a breeze.
The Hardware
I chose this netbook, well, because it was just sitting on my shelve with other devices. Girlfriend got this AAO in 2010 and stopped using it about 2 years ago because of its unusable nature. Honestly, the AAO-D250 shouldn't have come with any version of Windows on it since it is a well known resource hogger. The netbook's hardware specs are nothing to desire; the Intel Atom N270@1.6GHz and WD 320GB 5400RPM STAT-I(1.5Gbit/s) HDD are okay but the 1GB DDR2 @533Hmz RAM doesn't leave you with much options when it comes to OS choices. However, I was able to increase it to 2GB of RAM in order to run OpenBSD with some room to spare. After installing OpenBSD 5.7 and rebooting, the Ethernet port was detected and assigned an ip with no issues. Actually, most of the hardware is supported except for the wireless card, which is a real bummer. The wireless card is a Broadcom BCM4315 which after hours of researching how to get OpenBSD to work with it (it gets recognized at boot, but it's not supported by the bwi firmware), I found out that it wasn't even supported by most Linux distros. So that only leaves the option of Windows which ironically isn't usable on this hardware, unless you want to wait a minimum of 5-10mins for every task to be processed. However, the wireless card can be replaced if you have the patience to tear apart the netbook, because it is located inside unlike most notebooks where they are accessible by removing the back cover. And that's exactly what I did, I took a RealTek wireless card from another old notebook and installed on the easily accessible and free miniPCIe on the back of the netbook instead of taking it apart. OpenBSD was able to detect and configure it on boot and was able to get wireless working. The range is impressive seeing how I installed it without the two antenna wires that come with it (can be added later if needed with some modifications of course). Another important thing to note is that the screws from the other notebook that hold the wireless card to the chassis are not compatible with the screw hole (nut) on the netbook (I used tape for now), so keep that in mind if you are doing the same or buying a card from an online or local retailer.
The Software
Installing and configuring OpenBSD is straightforward. Unless you want to go deeper in the subject of configuration, everything works right out of the box on OpenBSD which is why I chose it. I decided to install XFCE4 as my desktop environment and it runs smooth for the most part, and keep in mind the SATA speed is only 1.5Gbit/s, so expect hiccups. In addition, OpenBSD is security-focused unlike FreeBSD. However, here is a list of issues I'm experiencing so far:
- Firefox is extremely slow, this is not specific to this netbook, I'm experiencing the same problem on a much faster machine. I believe that Firefox needs Linux emulation, but I'm not 100% sure (this issue is not present on FreeBSD).
- HDD hiccups mentioned above, every now and then when I type commands, I hear the HDD click as if it is waking up from a power down.
- Suspend works fine, resuming is not because every time the netbook resumes from suspend, it actually reboots and triggers this "WARNING: / was not properly unmounted", then it proceeds to making the system clean. This is not good as it can cause a major data corruption and inturn data loss. I'm still looking for a way to diagnose why apm causes this issue.
- Playing a video on mplayer/smplayer is not as smooth as you'd expect, sound is ahead of video (that needs some looking into as well).
