Here’s how you test the console frame buffer on DragonFly, even though X is the way to go.
Some time ago, I acquired a Chromebook with the help of all you kind readers. Here’s a mini-report on how DragonFly works as a desktop.
The hardware: what I have is an Acer c720 Chromebook. The C720p is the touchscreen model, and is equally well-supported by DragonFly. A larger-capacity M.2 SSD (which is relatively easy to install) is the only real need, as the installed one is only 16G. It’s easy enough to see what the laptops look like; it’s nothing fancy but it’s suitably light.
The software: There’s a wide-ranging and complete install/tweak guide for the c720 and c720p on the DragonFly site. Note that it goes down to the point of even changing the keymap for the special keys on the keyboard.
Things I don’t like:
- The mousepad needs a physical click, not a tap, which decreases accuracy.
- There’s only 2G of RAM, and not expandable. You will notice this if you tend to open a lot of tabs when web browsing.
- I’ve had mousepad trouble, but I’m the only one reporting it, so I think it’s just bad hardware luck on my part.
Things I do like:
- pkg is a godsend, making installation and upgrades almost effortless. I’ve gone binary-only so far.
- Many things Just Work – for example, the xfce4 battery plugin.
- xscreensaver works great; even the 3D modules. I don’t know why it entertains me so.
- I haven’t run the battery out to make sure, but it looks like it would last a few hours. Suspend/hibernate are not supported, but low power modes are.
- There’s a lot of multi-touch shortcuts built into the touchpad.
It’s an excellent BSD laptop, for light use, at low cost. The next step up would be into Thinkpad territory, which raises the cost or increases the age – and may not be as consistently supported.
Sascha Wildner has been removing the no-longer-needed bits of i386 support in DragonFly. One of the things going away is APM, the 32-bit power management superseded by acpiconf. If you still type ‘apm’ out of habit, it’s aliased so you won’t be surprised.
Now that DragonFly can (in most cases) offer video outside of X with KMS, not just text, more console options are possible. By default, your accelerated console will scale to 80×25, but you can now tell it how many columns you want and it’ll automatically scale to fit your resolution. Or you can turn it off.
Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau, powerd will now start the shutdown process if you are down to 2% battery on your DragonFly laptop. It also will delay for 60 seconds if you just booted up and are desperately searching for a power cable.
Matthew Dillon’s already using a 4K monitor on DragonFly, and he’s written notes on the various performance tweaks that went with it.
You can now get temperature readings from your Radeon card under DragonFly.
There’s a new ‘ifconsole’ option for /etc/ttys on DragonFly that may help you if your serial output device is a bit strange.
A recent commit from Matthew Dillon means users of Intel Haswell or later CPUs will see reduced power usage, if I’m reading this commit correctly.
This may not be a huge surprise, but the Minnowboard MAX can run DragonFly just fine, modulo some dmesg complaints.
Francois Tigeot has committed his Broadwell work, which has a longer-than-I-realized list of benefits. Does anyone have a 4k screen to try?
I’m late posting about these, but they go together: Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ability to read CPU temperature through various sysctls, and the same for DIMM temperature readings.
Matthew Dillon bought a system with a Broadwell series CPU, installed DragonFly, and wrote up his experience. Read it if you plan on purchasing this hardware any time soon.
Francois Tigeot has a new update to the drm/i915 driver for testing. It matches, feature-wise, what’s in Linux 3.12. Try it if you’ve got the hardware. (and dragonfly-master)
Matthew Dillon pulled in a new USB update from FreeBSD to DragonFly. What does it change? I’m not completely sure, but he did it to get apcupsd working, so that may be a hint.
If you’ve been sitting with a Radeon-based video card and wishing you had all the nice updates i915 users are getting, today is your lucky day. Michael Neumann has brought Radeon support equivalent to Linux 3.9 into DragonFly, and he has a 3.10 branch for testing if you feel adventurous.
I admit I never thought about it much, but I’ve also never had enough RAM to matter: there’s a memtemp(4) tool that monitors temperature sensors for your system’s memory. Sepherosa Ziehau has updated it on DragonFly to support some newer processor setups.