so i finished my graphic design course just today and i'm gonna get my degree!! finally my little self will be a graphic designer!!! yayy i'm so, so proud of myself!!
a few days ago, my dearest sister gave me her old laptop that she didn't use anymore, and i first moved all the memories, all the photos, and stuff from the ntfs partition (it had windows 7 ultimate i386 on it). so i copied them into my main laptop (my ideapad). i then formatted it and installed freebsd on it.
the hardware is pretty basic, but if it can do virtualization (which it can) it's quite powerful with the right operating system. i'm more of a gnu/linux admin myself, but i wanted to give freebsd a try for quite a while now, and now i had the opportunity, so i got straight into it, downloaded the freebsd 14.3-release amd64 iso, burned it into an usb, and installed it.
it's an hp 255 g3 laptop from 2014, it has the e1-2100 processor with radeon hd 8210 graphics, from amd, running at 1.00 ghz total, bios/uefi hybrid firmware...
the ram is fine for myself, it has 2 gb of ram, but i don't do heavy stuff either, so...
it's got a sata iii (6 gb/s) 5400rpm standard spinning hard disk drive, 500 gb of storage capacity, and it has a 1366x768 screen, the qualcomm atheros qca9565/ar9565 wireless network adapter, a realtek alc282 sound card
one little quirk: my little self had to boot it in bios (legacy/csm) mode, because uefi gave me a lot of problems with the video driver (we're gonna talk about it later) even if it was the amd64 version, but aside from that it actually booted fine, though. it asked me what i wanted to do with the drive, and i formatted it as zfs, then selected the corresponding software sets (kernel, kernel-dbg, base, lib32)...
the install process was smooth, and the first thing i noticed, is a fun little quirk: the installer asked me to install firmware for the radeon hd 8210, but when i typed:
dmesg | grep drm
i got nothing. then i logged in as root, and did this:
pkg install drm-kmod
pw usermod video [my user]
then in /etc/rc.conf, i put:
kld_list="radeonkms"
then rebooted. though here comes another quirk: the screen stayed black, so i got to force off the laptop and when it said something like "loading radeonkms" or stuff, i repeatedly pressed ctrl-c, and it got to ttyv0 (the system console) just fine.
i then installed lightdm, its gtk interface, dbus, and the lxde desktop environment (xfce was a bit heavy for it, ironically), and kde plasma and gnome were a no no for this kinda hardware, so...
anyway i put:
lightdm_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
to /etc/rc.conf, and reboot. soo this time, i got a working desktop!!
every single piece of hardware was recognized and configured, even wifi and sound...
and this laptop is so, so old, that the battery was worn out, and it would shut itself off even at 81% or stuff. it even turned itself off mid-update! so i took off the battery, archived it on my room's drawer, and now i'm running this thing on ac power only. in fact, i'm writing this from freebsd!
so that was about it for this post, i'm gonna explore freebsd, and see how it goes!