Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> UEFI boot support means systems that lack BIOS compat will work now.

> ASUS X205TA is an example of a machine with reduced hardware ACPI. Also has Broadcom wifi. I don’t know of a particularly good choice in the netbook category.

The ASUS X205TA is a machine that is hostile to anything not Windows.

It doesn't have bios. It has 64 bit architecture, but a 32 bit EFI. That makes it harder ot install for example some Linuxes.

Here's a 51 page thread in the Ubuntu forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2254322&page=51

Here's someone trying to write a driver for sound: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/138822

Here's the guide to getting debian on it: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/X205TA

Here's the (as usual, excellent) guide to getting Arch on it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_x205ta

I guess people using BSD are happy with installs that are more complex than "burn an image to a USB stick; boot from that USB stick; click a button". But here's an example of someone installing Arch: http://ifranali.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/installing-arch-linux...

It's a shame it's so hostile because, considering the price, it's a nice enough machine. (The screen is lousy, and the sound is odd. If you liked the EEE PC 701, well, this isn't as good.)

OpenBSD doesn't use GRUB. OpenBSD's EFI loader is a port of the existing second-stage loader, boot(8). It can load both i386 and amd64 kernels, and there are EFI binaries for 64-bit and 32-bit firmware.

"I guess people using BSD... burn an image to a USB stick..."

I always thought "burn" referred to optical storage like CD-ROM?

Not sure about others, but when I do BSD installs I do not have to click any buttons. I do not need a mouse.

I can lazily use something as small as an 8M stick for the install image. It couldn't be much easier.

With the size of today's RAM (500M+), using the install image I can make the custom image with my personal kernel configs, utilities, and settings entirely in memory without needing to write anything to a HDD. Then I just dd the image to the removable media. That is the slowest step.

My custom images are quite small too, under 16M, and need no access to a HDD. The system runs just fine in RAM, no swap.

I guess I could do the same setup with "Arch" but I imagine it would take considerable work undoing pre-configurations based on assumptions about how I would want my system configured.

Easier perhaps to just compile my own custom Linux kernel and "initrd". Build from the ground up.

I like the flexibility and control with BSD. Not to say Linux does not have flexibility and control, too. It certainly does. I just rarely see ordinary Linux users making use of it when installing. Instead many if not all decisions have already been made, and everything is pre-configured. "One click..."

Kudos to the OpenBSD folks for the network drivers.

Can I PXE boot the OpenBSD image? I know when I looked it up for FreeBSD the information was quite sparse.

http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/5.8/i386/INSTALL.i386

Also, if you learn to use installboot(8) you can make your own PXE bootable images.

I would read the Makefiles in the OpenBSD source tree to see how they make their install images.

Note I'm not an OpenBSD user and have not installed it in many years so I'm not the best person to ask. I use an earlier distribution, the one that spawned OpenBSD. Similar but not the same.

PXE booting OpenBSD is covered in the FAQ: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq6.html#PXE

Yes, all you need is `pxeboot` and `bsd.rd`. Put them in the root of your TFTP server's directory, have your DHCP server hand out `pxeboot` as the filename (and rename `bsd.rd` to `bsd` on your TFTP server) and point it towards your TFTP server, boot via PXE, and install.

You can mirror the install sets locally (on a HTTP server) for performance reasons, if you like; otherwise, you can just download them from an HTTP mirror during the installation.

I've been working on automating the whole process (fully-automated installations for bringing up new VMs) and it's so much simpler than with other operating systems.

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