> Of course, there’s no X at this point. And definitely no touch screen. And no internal networking. However, by keeping our USB hub attached, we can drive the console and access the network. At least until the battery is depleted, even if we have no way of knowing how long that will be since we disabled all the ACPI devices, which also means no suspend or resume.
> But it’s all worth it to know that we’ve unshackled this device from the proprietary operating system it ships with.
It's quite exciting to see the BSD folks working on these minimal notebooks.
One of the longest (the longest?) threads on the Ubuntu forums are people trying to install Ubuntu on a similar device, the Asus X205ta.
It's even easier for us to boot because OpenBSD doesn't use GRUB. OpenBSD's EFI loader is a port of the existing second-stage loader, boot(8). It can load both i386 and amd64 kernels, and there are EFI binaries for 64-bit and 32-bit firmware on the USB install media.
At this time 32-bit or 'i386' kernels don't support EFI yet, but there aren't many 32-bit CPUs out there.. more people probably run into the 32-bit EFI firmware with 64-bit CPU scenario.
I think Ted even wrote about the Asus X205TA on his blog before.
> But it’s all worth it to know that we’ve unshackled this device from the proprietary operating system it ships with.
It's quite exciting to see the BSD folks working on these minimal notebooks.
One of the longest (the longest?) threads on the Ubuntu forums are people trying to install Ubuntu on a similar device, the Asus X205ta.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2254322&s=035dc3be...
Here's the Arch wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/X205TA
Here are people talking about drivers for sound: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95681