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Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD
- stevefan1999 4mo agoI still think it is very cursed to see that image of RMS using that laptop despite I was shocked to see it 12 years ago. Still shocks me to this day.
- em-bee 4mo agowhat is shocking about it?
- sellmesoap 3mo agoI think because it's RMS champion of digital openess using using an archaine Chinese laptop, it's the dichotomy of China providing a product that's essentially more free (of binary blob firmware) then a western equivalent laptop. Take heed and dispare oh ye providers of win modems!
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo agoIf you want to really shock, have Midjourney make a pic of him, using a MacBook. I seriously doubt there’s a real one, out there. Haven’t heard from him in a while. I know he was suffering health issues.
- mghackerlady 3mo agoIronically, since there is a specific model of macbook (the 2008 ones iirc? IDK they were the plastic ones that came in black and white) with nearly identical internals to a well supported FSF approved laptop, you can run a full GNU stack (GNUboot, linux-libre, guix) on a mac
- JdeBP 4mo agoThe wsconscfg problem with multiple screens, whatever it exactly is, is decidedly odd. According to this, the display is being driven as smfb0 in what is largely a dumb framebuffer mode, no acceleration, no GPU, no fancy high jinks whatsoever. wscons/wsdisplay should have no difficulty with multiple screens on that sort of thing.
- anthk 4mo agoNo computer is obsolete with a BSD. I still use an n270 netbook daily.
- bentley 3mo agoThe NetSurf browser the author tried out has multiple frontends. Two run on OpenBSD that I know of, the “default” GTK frontend and an SDL‐based framebuffer frontend. As was pointed out, GTK has a rather sizeable number of dependencies; building the framebuffer frontend instead would save a lot of time.
- classichasclass 3mo ago(author) Is there a way to specifically build the framebuffer version from the ports tree? I didn't see one.
- bentley 3mo ago/usr/ports/www/netsurf/netsurf-fb/
- classichasclass 3mo agoThanks, I'll try that.
- JdeBP 3mo agoThe annoying thing, looking at that, is that libnsfb (the library that netsurf-fb uses to construct its UI) once had a driver, deleted back in 2018, that could work directly with a Linux framebuffer device. This could have been easily adapted into a similar driver for wscons/wsdisplay/wskbd on OpenBSD and NetBSD. * https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/commit/b2bb565402143c2b63d00ac8c89e3197ffe5354f https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/commit/b2bb565402... Instead, libnsfb is now layered on top of SDL in the non-X11 non-Wayland case, with all of the dependencies and extra stuff that that entails, which of course you'll have to build. SDL3 explicitly doesn't handle dumb framebuffers and full wscons, explicitly requiring foreign KMS systems from Linux on the BSDs. * https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-kmsbsd https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-kmsbsd libnsfb then proceeds to ignore almost all of SDL anyway and draw its own UI directly, with SDL being little more than a glorified framebuffer-as-bitmap system with a couple of basic blitting operations. * https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/blob/master/src/surface/sdl.c#L402 https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/blob/master/src/s...
- shrubble 3mo agoIt’s tough to find them on eBay; I wonder what the right search terms are?
- mattst88 3mo agoI think they're super uncommon in the west. I think they're also super useless, to be honest. Incredibly slow. Linux support continued to degrade the entire time I owned mine. The keyboard and display are far too small to be usable. The graphics chip accelerates basically nothing. I sold mine [1] on eBay back in October. I hope the new owner enjoys it more than I did :) [1] https://mattst88.com/computers/yeeloong/ https://mattst88.com/computers/yeeloong/
- ronjakoi 3mo agoI have one stashed away. Bought it from a Dutch importer in the late 2000s. I also ran OpenBSD on it for a while.
- acjones8 3mo agoYoooo, small world! I'm the guy in Hawaii who bought it from you :) I haven't done anything too exciting with it yet, still have to get around to seeing if T2 SDE works on it, but it's joined me a number of times on trips to the library for writing, and it's been delightful for that. The keyboard is surprisingly good, and it feels like a supercomputer compared to a WorkPad Z50, hah. Thanks for having taken such good care of it!
- userbinator 3mo agoI don't think these machines achieved much popularity in China either, as standard PCs were far more common and compatible with the existing software base. the keyboard and trackpad are internally PS/2. Interesting that the PC influence is still there, although I'm pretty sure a MIPS doesn't have them on port 60h/64h, or indeed any I/O ports. I remember having a similar moment of surprise when I played around with an ARM VM and discovered it had a "VGA-compatible" GPU emulating an old ISA-class chip.
- justin66 3mo agoA decade’s worth of SGI machines combined MIPS processors with PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports.
- walrus01 3mo agoTo be fair to that there wasn't really any other viable mass-market interface that the keyboard manufacturers in China/Taiwan could standardize on. The PS/2 keyboard interface was backwards compatible with an AT keyboard through the user of a passive physical pin adapter. And USB didn't exist yet.
- justin66 3mo agoOddly enough, the SGI Fuel (also the Tezro, I think) had PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports but also offered USB ports and support for HID devices in IRIX. I have no idea whether the keyboard and mouse that shipped with those later SGIs were PS/2 or USB devices. edit: IMO there was nothing wrong with preferring PS/2 to USB 20-some years ago. Higher theoretical refresh rate on the PS/2 mouse at that time and the PS/2 keyboard offered better n-key rollover, although I question whether any of that mattered one way or the other to an SGI owner
- walrus01 3mo agoIn x86 i386 world there was a good long overlap of ATX/MicroATX motherboards shipping with both PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports and also USB ports on them, starting from 1998 era Pentium 2/3 systems when USB first became commonplace and continuing until probably 2010 or so.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago"However, I can find no evidence that Richard Stallman had/has a dog, or indeed any pet." According to his own disclosures, he has a fear of dogs https://web.archive.org/web/20120119135147if_/https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120119135147if_/https://secure...
- n4r9 3mo agoThat link says he's okay with dogs unless they bark angrily or jump up at people.
- cl3misch 3mo agoHis long list of conditions is an interesting read. It comes off as arrogant in places, but I guess if you really travel a lot and have unusual requirements it's best for everyone to be upfront about it!
- thenthenthen 3mo ago$ man stallman Very interesting read, I like and dislike the upfrontness for the same reasons. Love it that he stresses to not buy a parrot for him as a surprise. Wonder if that happened before :/. Also, I want to cook eggplant for him now!
- thenthenthen 3mo agoIts pretty comprehensive as well, but I am struggling how any non technical person would deal with his requests? Asking my HR for a plain text ASCII flight ticket will surely throw some spanners in the cogs
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago"Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me, unless they are small and cannot reach much above my knees." No fear of small dogs
- sandbach 3mo agoFor those curious about the Godson–dog food connection, the Chinese code name was 狗剩 gǒu shèng 'scraps for the dog'. https://baike.baidu.com/item/Godson/10744024 https://baike.baidu.com/item/Godson/10744024