Chromebook c720 results

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.

 

A PHP upgrade note

The other day, I updated some packages using pkg.  The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6.  I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies.  I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version.  pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately.  I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.

None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned.  pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes.  This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.

DragonFly as a desktop

There’s been so much work in DragonFly recently that makes a desktop easier (i915 support, dports, and so on), that I decided to resurrect an older Dell machine and use it as my desktop.

The Dell that I’m using is a leftover from someone else’s workplace; it’s 7 years old, and has “only” 4G of RAM and a Core 2 DuoE6600  CPU in it.  It works, however.

Setting up DragonFly and installing xorg and so on is pretty straightforward.  Using dports makes it crazy quick to add all the packages.  I went for XFCE4 because I could.  Starting X gave me some trouble at first; the default config couldn’t find the mouse and would eventually crash.

Running ‘X -configure’ created a xorg.conf file I could edit, and these lines in /etc/rc.conf gave me a working mouse:

moused_enable="YES"
moused_type="auto"
moused_port="/dev/ums0"

The crashing problem with my radeon-driven video card was fixed by turning off the acceleration – uncommenting this line in xorg.conf did it:

Option     "NoAccel"

Video performance isn’t as nice as I would like it with acceleration, but this is an older machine anyway.

I couldn’t get sound working. Francois Tigeot has a branch of DragonFly that contains newer sound drivers brought over from FreeBSD, here:

git://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~ftigeot/dragonfly.git (pcm_2014_september branch.)

It doesn’t support device cloning, so I can run Youtube videos and XMMS, but not audio from both at the same time.  (for instance; not that you’d want to do this other than by accident)

I installed x11/webfonts, and web pages look a bit better after changing my default font preferences.

And… that’s about it.  It’s a working desktop.  Digging up a half-height video card that has working acceleration is a next step, but I can’t imagine that’ll be expensive.  I wish I had done this a long time ago.

In Other BSDs for 2014/09/06

Why is it so warm out?  I want autumn to start.

pkg upgrade tip for pkg 1.3

DragonFly’s using pkg 1.3, at least on master, and I’ve seen a few people report an error message when performing ‘pkg upgrade’.   The error message usually includes something like:

pkg: need to re-create repo Avalon to upgrade schema vers

If you get this, do ‘pkg update -f’ and it will complete.