Tuesday 3 January 2012

Adventures with OpenBSD - OpenBSD 5.0 on Sun Blade 1500

The scenario:

Installation of OpenBSD 5.0 on an Sun Blade 1500. I've replaced the default XVR-600 piece of proprietary junk video card with a Sun PGX-64 PCI Video Graphics card that uses the mach64 chipset for rendering things. Instantly I had a much nicer console and a far more workable X configuration. The only trick was getting the bloody thing to use 1280x1024 with 24bit resolution on my 19" Dell monitor. Here are the notes from the exercise:

Default installation
man afterboot

Dell E198FP Sync rates:
  • 30 kHz to 81 kHz (automatic)
  • 56 Hz to 76 Hz
Make sure to copy the above into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and also add:
Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth    24
                SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes   "1280x1024"
        EndSubSection
EndSection
- to force it to use 1280x1024

Add to .profile: PKG_PATH=http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/OpenBSD/5.0/packages/`machine -a`/

Installing Fluxbox (to play with more than anything):

pkg_add -i -vv fluxbox feh

Make sure to add exec /usr/local/bin/startfluxbox to .xinitrc by doing:

$ cat "exec /usr/local/bin/startfluxbox" > .xinitrc

Also do this to .xsession so startx grabs it straight away:

$ cat "exec /usr/local/bin/startfluxbox" > .xsession

pkg_add -i -vv midori -> lightweight browser, and tends to install a billion dependencies (mostly media playing type stuff which isn't bad)
pkg_add -i -vv firefox36
pkg_add -i -vv mousepad (lightweight text editor)
pkg_add -i -vv filezilla (FTP and stuff)
pkg_add -i -vv goffice (some kind of office thing - need to examine it more closely)
pkg_add -i -vv ristretto (basic image editing and viewing)
pkg_add -i -vv epdfview (PDF viewing)
pkg_add -i -vv conky (for checking out the system loads)
pkg_add -i -vv eterm (my favourite terminal program)

Note: fluxbox menus need a lot of work - I've deleted/commented out a *lot* of stuff to clean this all up.

pkg_add -u (check for any updates or errata)

Also look at this : http://www.gabsoftware.com/tips/tutorial-install-gnome-desktop-and-gnome-display-manager-on-openbsd-4-8/ for using Gnome and GDM

2 comments:

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