commit 2aa3b0d78e7f31598ba43a25ac374ef0e18ba220
parent 6927f1dac6136daddb65c38f61b0f160ff5efea2
Author: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:10:18 +0200
Added blog post
Diffstat:
7 files changed, 313 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/darkstar.jpg b/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/darkstar.jpg
Binary files differ.
diff --git a/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/final.jpg b/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/final.jpg
Binary files differ.
diff --git a/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/hd.jpg b/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/hd.jpg
Binary files differ.
diff --git a/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/netbooks.md b/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/netbooks.md
@@ -0,0 +1,305 @@
+# Long live netbooks!
+
+[*Netbook*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook) was a term used
+around 2010 to describe small laptops. They could be anywhere from 8"
+to 11" in screen size. One of the most popular lines of netbooks were the
+[Asus eee PCs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC).
+
+The appeal was clear: you could bring this tiny computer around and take
+advantage of any free wifi connection - be it on a train, in a pub or
+at school - to surf the web.
+
+Netbooks had an unfortunate destiny for at least two reasons. Firstly,
+laptop technology was not at a point where you could have a small,
+relatively powerful and cheap device all in one. Most netbooks were
+underpowered and struggled to run Windows out of the box. Secondly,
+smartphones and tablets, that came out very shortly after, quickly
+overtook the netbooks' market share and sent them to oblivion.
+
+This post is going to be in two parts: first I want to talk about the
+netbook I got in 2010 and how it turned out to be useful in 2022. The
+second part is going to be a list of steps I took to set it up after
+re-installing OpenBSD on it.
+
+## Part 1: My "darkstar"
+
+### In the 2010's
+
+Back in 2010, when I was in high school, I started going on 4-5 days long
+trips about once every two months or so. I did not have a laptop, only a
+desktop PC, so my mother thought it was a good idea to get me a netbook.
+She chose an Asus 1001px, a very standard 10" netbook. It was in many
+ways un unremarkable machine, with 1Gb of ram a weak dual core CPU. But
+it got its job done.
+
+
+
+It ran some Windows monstrosity that I did not dare touching (was it
+Vista or 7?). I immediately installed Linux on it. My favorite distro
+at the time was [Slackware](http://www.slackware.com/), but I decided
+to try out Arch on this one. I used the hostname *darkstar*, because
+it was the default on my favourite distro and it fit nicely with it's
+black plastic. I have used that name for this laptop on every other OS
+I installed on it ever since.
+
+Arch Linux was a bad choice: since I would use this netbook only once
+every two months, every time I updated it something broke. Or, as an Arch
+fanboy would say nowadays, "something required manual intervention". At
+some point I got rid of Arch and installed Slackware.
+
+I also used it without problems at the beginning of university, in 2013,
+but after a few months I bought a more powerful 15" regular laptop.
+All in all I have not used my darkstar much, but it was a useful tool.
+
+### Distro hopping in 2020
+
+When the first lockdowns came in March 2020 I had decided to use my
+netbook for some little experiments. Nothing crazy, just trying out some
+distros and play around with them - had *distro-hopped* since 2011 or so.
+
+I installed [Alpine](https://www.alpinelinux.org/) first. It was fine,
+but the lack of man pages by default did not amuse me. Then I tried
+[Void](https://voidlinux.org/), that I ended up installing on my main
+laptop later that year and I am still using as my main OS to this day.
+Finally I decided to try something different and went with OpenBSD.
+
+### Backpacking in 2022
+
+Earlier this year I traveled around Europe for a couple of weeks,
+mainly to attend the
+[Rubik's Cube European Championship](https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/competitions/Euro2022)
+and other events. I wanted to travel with just a backpack, no suitcase,
+and my main laptop is quite large and heavy. I did not want to rely on
+my smartphone alone, so I thought that carrying around my old netbook
+could be a good compromise.
+
+I kept OpenBSD, because I figured I would mostly use it in tty only, no X,
+and the command line utilities seem more polished and cohesive on
+OpenBSD than on Linux. Using something like Firefox was doable in case
+of emergency, but definitely not a pleasant experience. Some things
+like streaming videos from YouTube were completely impossible -
+but there were workarounds like using
+[yt-dlp](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp).
+
+I decided to buy a larger battery, that also made it stand a bit taller,
+kinda like a typewrite, and some extra RAM - I maxed it out at 2Gb, it
+cannot handle more. Since the hard drive was not easily accessible without
+taking apart the whole thing, I did not upgrade to an SSD drive at first.
+I was afraid of not being able to detach and re-attach the keyboard and
+touchpad connectors without damaging them.
+
+My little netbook turned out to be more useful than I thought: the
+organization team at a cube competition I attended during that trip was
+short on laptops, and mine was perfectly capable of displaying pdf files.
+The fact that there was no file manager installed made it a bit hard
+for other people to operate it when I was not around, but in the end we
+managed to use it.
+
+
+
+After the trip I kept using it occasionally, as a "sofa laptop". I wrote
+a couple of these blog posts on it. Who needs more than 1Gb of ram to
+write some Markdown and push it with rsync?
+
+A few weeks ago I changed my mind about the hard drive and tried
+disassemblying *darkstar* completely, just to reassemble it and check
+that all went well. And it did! So I bought a cheap SSD and used it to
+replace the original hard drive.
+
+
+
+Of course when putting everything back together I somehow improperly
+attached the keyboard, so that it worked in the BIOS but not after boot,
+and I also damaged the touchpad connector. Luckily I was able to fix
+both these issues.
+
+I was finally ready to install OpenBSD 7.1 on the new SSD.
+
+## Part 2: Installing and configuring OpenBSD
+
+This section is probably more useful for me as a personal note than for
+anyone else who might be reading it. Nonetheless I figured people might
+be curious, and it does not hurt to publish it here. If you don't care
+about it, just skip to the "Conclusion" section at the end.
+
+The whole install process was super simple and took about 6 minutes.
+The new SSD drive probably helped a lot here. After the installation of the
+base system was completed, I made a few tweaks and added some packages.
+I am not one of those cool people who have a git repository with all their
+config files and script that put everything into place automatically, I just
+do everything by hand. Since I don't reinstall my OS every other day it is
+not a big deal.
+
+### Security patches
+
+First I updated the base system by installing the newest security patches
+with `syspatch(8)`
+
+```
+# syspatch
+Get/Verify syspatch71-001_wifi.tgz 100% |********************| 4423KB 00:003
+Installing patch 001_wifi
+syspatch: updated itself, run it again to install missing patches
+```
+
+Ok then, one more time
+
+```
+# syspatch
+(...)
+Errata can be reviewed under /var/syspatch
+```
+
+All good now!
+
+### Enabling doas for the regular user
+
+OpenBSD's `doas` is roughly the equivalent of Linux's `sudo`. Unlike `sudo`,
+we just need a one-line config file to use it:
+
+```
+# echo 'permit persist :wheel' > /etc/doas.conf
+```
+
+### Swap caps lock and escape
+
+I like to have the Caps Lock key function as Escape, and vice versa. To have
+this in X one can use `setxkbmap -option caps:swapescape`, but for the OpenBSD
+console we need to use `wsconsctl(8)`, or to edit `wsconsctl.conf(5)` if we
+want to make it permanent:
+
+```
+# cat > /etc/wsconsctl.conf
+keyboard.map+="keycode 58 = Escape"
+keyboard.map+="keycode 1 = Caps_Lock"
+^D
+```
+
+The change won't happen until we reboot or we issue the
+corresponding `wsconsctl` commands.
+
+### Generating ssh keys
+
+Simply run
+
+```
+$ ssh_keygen
+```
+
+to get a new pair for RSA keys. Using another device (with its own ssh key), I then
+copy the public key to my server's `.ssh/authorized_keys` file.
+
+### Installing and configuring syncthing
+
+I use [syncthing](https://syncthing.net/) to share some files and folders
+between my devices. It is a nice and flexible piece of software that does
+not rely on any centralized service. I use it both to keep important files
+synchronized between my main devices and to quickly exchange
+data locally between my phone and my laptop (e.g. pictures). One of the
+advantages about its decentralized structure is that in the latter case
+I do not need an internet connection (nor a cable).
+
+After installing syncthing with
+
+```
+# pkg_add -u syncthing
+```
+
+I enabled the corresponding service
+
+```
+# rcctl enable syncthing
+```
+
+I also want it to run as my user instead as the default `_syncthing` user:
+
+```
+# rcctl set syncthing user sebastiano
+```
+
+Finally, I had to adjust the file descriptor limits. As documented in the
+official doc `/usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes/syncthing`:
+
+```
+Syncthing is fairly hungry for file descriptors and the default limits may be
+insufficient. On OpenBSD, Syncthing uses kqueue(2) to "watch" files, and since
+kqueue(2) doesn't support recursive watching, each file has be watched
+individually. The upshot of this is that each file in a watched folder will use
+one file descriptor.
+
+If you run Syncthing via the rc.d(8) script, then you can give
+Syncthing more file descriptors by adding the following to login.conf(5):
+
+ syncthing:\
+ :openfiles-cur=4096:\
+ :openfiles-max=4096:\
+ :tc=daemon:
+
+Don't forget to rebuild the login.conf.db file (if necessary):
+
+ # [ -f /etc/login.conf.db ] && cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf
+
+Note that in addition to ulimits, there is a kernel-level file descriptor limit
+which may also need to be adjusted. This limit is managed through the
+kern.maxfiles sysctl(8).
+```
+
+So let's be generous and set these limits very high:
+
+```
+# echo "kern.maxfiles=4000000" > /etc/sysctl.conf
+# cat > /etc/login.conf
+
+syncthing:\
+ :openfiles-cur=1000000:\
+ :openfiles-max=1000000:\
+ :tc=daemon:
+^D
+```
+
+I can then configure syncthing using its web-based interface. To avoid
+opening up a full-fledged web browser on this poor little thing, I can
+use *ssh port forwarding* from my other laptop:
+
+```
+# ssh -N -L 8888:localhost:8384 darkstar
+```
+
+(I won't go into detail on this command; `darkstar` is the hostname of my
+netbook, `8384` is syncthing's default port for its web-based interface,
+`8888` was picked arbitrarily.)
+
+I can then open `http://localhost:8888` from my other laptop to access
+my netbook's syncthing configuration and add other devices and shared
+folders.
+
+### All the rest
+
+Now all that is left to do is pretty straightforward: install some more programs
+(such as a browser, a media player and a pdf reader), copy my config files (e.g.
+`.profile`, `.nexrc`) from my shared folder, clone some of my git repos.
+
+Nothing that is worth describing in detail here.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+I like my netbook, and I am glad that I found some practical use for
+it even after 12 years. It's size make it a nice sofa companion, and
+its clicky keyboard is just a pleasure to type on - much better than the
+mushy one of my main laptop! It is always a pleasure for me to make good
+use of a piece of hardware that most people would consider obsolete and
+throw away without thinking twice.
+
+Netbooks were not successful in their time, but I think similar devices
+could find their niche today. After all, 13" laptops are quite popular
+among the few who actually need one over a tablet or a smartphone. I
+am even considering getting an 11" laptop as my next main device - but
+of course I would never replace my current one as long as it is working
+fine :-)
+
+Long live netbooks!
+
+To conclude, here is a picture of my netbook being used to write this
+very post:
+
+
diff --git a/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/scramble.jpg b/src/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks/scramble.jpg
Binary files differ.
diff --git a/src/blog/blog.md b/src/blog/blog.md
@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
[RSS Feed](feed.xml)
+* 2022-09-10 [Long live netbooks!](2022-09-10-netbooks)
* 2022-09-05 [Pipe man into col -b to get rid of \^H](2022-09-05-man-col)
* 2022-08-14 [How I update my website](2022-08-14-website)
* 2022-07-07 [The man page reading club: shutdown(8)](2022-07-07-shutdown)
diff --git a/src/blog/feed.xml b/src/blog/feed.xml
@@ -9,6 +9,13 @@ Thoughts about software, computers and whatever I feel like sharing
</description>
<item>
+<title>Long live netbooks!</title>
+<link>https://sebastiano.tronto.net/blog/2022-09-10-netbooks</link>
+<description>Long live netbooks!</description>
+<pubDate>2022-09-10</pubDate>
+</item>
+
+<item>
<title>Pipe man into col -b to get rid of \^H</title>
<link>https://sebastiano.tronto.net/blog/2022-09-05-man-col</link>
<description>Pipe man into col -b to get rid of \^H</description>
