His long list of conditions is an interesting read. It comes off as arrogant in places, but I guess if you really travel a lot and have unusual requirements it's best for everyone to be upfront about it!
Very interesting read, I like and dislike the upfrontness for the same reasons. Love it that he stresses to not buy a parrot for him as a surprise. Wonder if that happened before :/. Also, I want to cook eggplant for him now!
Its pretty comprehensive as well, but I am struggling how any non technical person would deal with his requests? Asking my HR for a plain text ASCII flight ticket will surely throw some spanners in the cogs
The NetSurf browser the author tried out has multiple frontends. Two run on OpenBSD that I know of, the “default” GTK frontend and an SDL‐based framebuffer frontend. As was pointed out, GTK has a rather sizeable number of dependencies; building the framebuffer frontend instead would save a lot of time.
The annoying thing, looking at that, is that libnsfb (the library that netsurf-fb uses to construct its UI) once had a driver, deleted back in 2018, that could work directly with a Linux framebuffer device. This could have been easily adapted into a similar driver for wscons/wsdisplay/wskbd on OpenBSD and NetBSD.
Instead, libnsfb is now layered on top of SDL in the non-X11 non-Wayland case, with all of the dependencies and extra stuff that that entails, which of course you'll have to build. SDL3 explicitly doesn't handle dumb framebuffers and full wscons, explicitly requiring foreign KMS systems from Linux on the BSDs.
libnsfb then proceeds to ignore almost all of SDL anyway and draw its own UI directly, with SDL being little more than a glorified framebuffer-as-bitmap system with a couple of basic blitting operations.
I don't think these machines achieved much popularity in China either, as standard PCs were far more common and compatible with the existing software base.
the keyboard and trackpad are internally PS/2.
Interesting that the PC influence is still there, although I'm pretty sure a MIPS doesn't have them on port 60h/64h, or indeed any I/O ports. I remember having a similar moment of surprise when I played around with an ARM VM and discovered it had a "VGA-compatible" GPU emulating an old ISA-class chip.
PCI has the concept of I/O ports even if the CPU doesn't. The details differ depending on whether it's PCI or PCIe, but the net effect is that whatever's responsible for putting the access on the bus exposes an MMIO window that corresponds to the the port addresses available, and generates port I/O cycles in response to accesses to that window.
To be fair to that there wasn't really any other viable mass-market interface that the keyboard manufacturers in China/Taiwan could standardize on. The PS/2 keyboard interface was backwards compatible with an AT keyboard through the user of a passive physical pin adapter. And USB didn't exist yet.
Oddly enough, the SGI Fuel (also the Tezro, I think) had PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports but also offered USB ports and support for HID devices in IRIX.
I have no idea whether the keyboard and mouse that shipped with those later SGIs were PS/2 or USB devices.
edit: IMO there was nothing wrong with preferring PS/2 to USB 20-some years ago. Higher theoretical refresh rate on the PS/2 mouse at that time and the PS/2 keyboard offered better n-key rollover, although I question whether any of that mattered one way or the other to an SGI owner
In x86 i386 world there was a good long overlap of ATX/MicroATX motherboards shipping with both PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports and also USB ports on them, starting from 1998 era Pentium 2/3 systems when USB first became commonplace and continuing until probably 2010 or so.
I am currently at a customer site installing a brand new mainstream budget computer purchased off the shelf from a brick and mortar retailer (Microcenter PowerSpec B687) which has PS/2 ports and a VGA output right next to the USB/HDMI/DP paired up with a 14th gen i5.
The wsconscfg problem with multiple screens, whatever it exactly is, is decidedly odd. According to this, the display is being driven as smfb0 in what is largely a dumb framebuffer mode, no acceleration, no GPU, no fancy high jinks whatsoever. wscons/wsdisplay should have no difficulty with multiple screens on that sort of thing.
I think they're also super useless, to be honest. Incredibly slow. Linux support continued to degrade the entire time I owned mine. The keyboard and display are far too small to be usable. The graphics chip accelerates basically nothing.
I sold mine [1] on eBay back in October. I hope the new owner enjoys it more than I did :)
Yoooo, small world! I'm the guy in Hawaii who bought it from you :)
I haven't done anything too exciting with it yet, still have to get around to seeing if T2 SDE works on it, but it's joined me a number of times on trips to the library for writing, and it's been delightful for that. The keyboard is surprisingly good, and it feels like a supercomputer compared to a WorkPad Z50, hah.
I think because it's RMS champion of digital openess using using an archaine Chinese laptop, it's the dichotomy of China providing a product that's essentially more free (of binary blob firmware) then a western equivalent laptop. Take heed and dispare oh ye providers of win modems!
Ironically, since there is a specific model of macbook (the 2008 ones iirc? IDK they were the plastic ones that came in black and white) with nearly identical internals to a well supported FSF approved laptop, you can run a full GNU stack (GNUboot, linux-libre, guix) on a mac
"However, I can find no evidence that Richard Stallman had/has a dog, or indeed any pet."
According to his own disclosures, he has a fear of dogs
https://web.archive.org/web/20120119135147if_/https://secure...
His long list of conditions is an interesting read. It comes off as arrogant in places, but I guess if you really travel a lot and have unusual requirements it's best for everyone to be upfront about it!
$ man stallman
Very interesting read, I like and dislike the upfrontness for the same reasons. Love it that he stresses to not buy a parrot for him as a surprise. Wonder if that happened before :/. Also, I want to cook eggplant for him now!
Its pretty comprehensive as well, but I am struggling how any non technical person would deal with his requests? Asking my HR for a plain text ASCII flight ticket will surely throw some spanners in the cogs
"Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me, unless they are small and cannot reach much above my knees."
No fear of small dogs
That link says he's okay with dogs unless they bark angrily or jump up at people.
The NetSurf browser the author tried out has multiple frontends. Two run on OpenBSD that I know of, the “default” GTK frontend and an SDL‐based framebuffer frontend. As was pointed out, GTK has a rather sizeable number of dependencies; building the framebuffer frontend instead would save a lot of time.
Mainline Dillo runs faster and smoother, it's just an fltk + git clone && configure +make install away.
(author) Is there a way to specifically build the framebuffer version from the ports tree? I didn't see one.
/usr/ports/www/netsurf/netsurf-fb/
Thanks, I'll try that.
The annoying thing, looking at that, is that libnsfb (the library that netsurf-fb uses to construct its UI) once had a driver, deleted back in 2018, that could work directly with a Linux framebuffer device. This could have been easily adapted into a similar driver for wscons/wsdisplay/wskbd on OpenBSD and NetBSD.
* https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/commit/b2bb565402...
Instead, libnsfb is now layered on top of SDL in the non-X11 non-Wayland case, with all of the dependencies and extra stuff that that entails, which of course you'll have to build. SDL3 explicitly doesn't handle dumb framebuffers and full wscons, explicitly requiring foreign KMS systems from Linux on the BSDs.
* https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-kmsbsd
libnsfb then proceeds to ignore almost all of SDL anyway and draw its own UI directly, with SDL being little more than a glorified framebuffer-as-bitmap system with a couple of basic blitting operations.
* https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/blob/master/src/s...
No computer is obsolete with a BSD. I still use an n270 netbook daily.
Same here. I have a Samsung NC10 netbook with that same CPU which I recently converted from Debian to NetBSD when they dropped 32-bit support.
I still have my NetBSD-running MSI Wind around somewhere...
Acer aspire one with NetBSD
For those curious about the Godson–dog food connection, the Chinese code name was 狗剩 gǒu shèng 'scraps for the dog'.
https://baike.baidu.com/item/Godson/10744024
I don't think these machines achieved much popularity in China either, as standard PCs were far more common and compatible with the existing software base.
the keyboard and trackpad are internally PS/2.
Interesting that the PC influence is still there, although I'm pretty sure a MIPS doesn't have them on port 60h/64h, or indeed any I/O ports. I remember having a similar moment of surprise when I played around with an ARM VM and discovered it had a "VGA-compatible" GPU emulating an old ISA-class chip.
> or indeed any I/O ports.
PCI has the concept of I/O ports even if the CPU doesn't. The details differ depending on whether it's PCI or PCIe, but the net effect is that whatever's responsible for putting the access on the bus exposes an MMIO window that corresponds to the the port addresses available, and generates port I/O cycles in response to accesses to that window.
A decade’s worth of SGI machines combined MIPS processors with PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports.
To be fair to that there wasn't really any other viable mass-market interface that the keyboard manufacturers in China/Taiwan could standardize on. The PS/2 keyboard interface was backwards compatible with an AT keyboard through the user of a passive physical pin adapter. And USB didn't exist yet.
Oddly enough, the SGI Fuel (also the Tezro, I think) had PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports but also offered USB ports and support for HID devices in IRIX.
I have no idea whether the keyboard and mouse that shipped with those later SGIs were PS/2 or USB devices.
edit: IMO there was nothing wrong with preferring PS/2 to USB 20-some years ago. Higher theoretical refresh rate on the PS/2 mouse at that time and the PS/2 keyboard offered better n-key rollover, although I question whether any of that mattered one way or the other to an SGI owner
In x86 i386 world there was a good long overlap of ATX/MicroATX motherboards shipping with both PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports and also USB ports on them, starting from 1998 era Pentium 2/3 systems when USB first became commonplace and continuing until probably 2010 or so.
I am currently at a customer site installing a brand new mainstream budget computer purchased off the shelf from a brick and mortar retailer (Microcenter PowerSpec B687) which has PS/2 ports and a VGA output right next to the USB/HDMI/DP paired up with a 14th gen i5.
The motherboard is an ASUS Prime H610M-A WiFi D4.
Asrock still makes some modern boards with PS/2 ports (though, it's usually a combo port)
Industrial boards and some workstations still come with PS/2 ports today.
PS/2 ports interrupt the CPU directly. You can't be faster than that.
And also don't install "keyboard drivers".
(author) My understanding is that they're wired into the AMD southbridge which provides them over memory mapped I/O.
> I'm pretty sure a MIPS doesn't have them on port 60h/64h, or indeed any I/O ports.
Funnily enough, it does. They're just sitting behind a AMD CS5536 PCI-to-ISA bridge.
https://man.openbsd.org/man4/loongson/glxpcib.4
https://man.openbsd.org/pckbc
...
> glxpcib0 at pci0 dev 14 function 0 "AMD CS5536 ISA" rev 0x03: rev 3, 32-bit 3579545Hz timer, watchdog, gpio, i2c
> isa0 at glxpcib0
> pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5 irq 1 irq 12
> pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
> wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard, using wsdisplay0
> pms0 at pckbc0 (aux slot)
> wsmouse0 at pms0 mux 0
> mcclock0 at isa0 port 0x70/2: mc146818 or compatible
...
Other machines, such as the DEC Alpha were similar.
The wsconscfg problem with multiple screens, whatever it exactly is, is decidedly odd. According to this, the display is being driven as smfb0 in what is largely a dumb framebuffer mode, no acceleration, no GPU, no fancy high jinks whatsoever. wscons/wsdisplay should have no difficulty with multiple screens on that sort of thing.
It’s tough to find them on eBay; I wonder what the right search terms are?
I think they're super uncommon in the west.
I think they're also super useless, to be honest. Incredibly slow. Linux support continued to degrade the entire time I owned mine. The keyboard and display are far too small to be usable. The graphics chip accelerates basically nothing.
I sold mine [1] on eBay back in October. I hope the new owner enjoys it more than I did :)
[1] https://mattst88.com/computers/yeeloong/
Yoooo, small world! I'm the guy in Hawaii who bought it from you :)
I haven't done anything too exciting with it yet, still have to get around to seeing if T2 SDE works on it, but it's joined me a number of times on trips to the library for writing, and it's been delightful for that. The keyboard is surprisingly good, and it feels like a supercomputer compared to a WorkPad Z50, hah.
Thanks for having taken such good care of it!
I have one stashed away. Bought it from a Dutch importer in the late 2000s. I also ran OpenBSD on it for a while.
I still think it is very cursed to see that image of RMS using that laptop despite I was shocked to see it 12 years ago. Still shocks me to this day.
what is shocking about it?
I think because it's RMS champion of digital openess using using an archaine Chinese laptop, it's the dichotomy of China providing a product that's essentially more free (of binary blob firmware) then a western equivalent laptop. Take heed and dispare oh ye providers of win modems!
RMS is a man of principle. He saw freedom radiating from that laptop and subscribed, doesn't care for geopolitics.
Based and redpilled, Stallman is.
If you want to really shock, have Midjourney make a pic of him, using a MacBook. I seriously doubt there’s a real one, out there.
Haven’t heard from him in a while. I know he was suffering health issues.
Ironically, since there is a specific model of macbook (the 2008 ones iirc? IDK they were the plastic ones that came in black and white) with nearly identical internals to a well supported FSF approved laptop, you can run a full GNU stack (GNUboot, linux-libre, guix) on a mac