So, yesterday I’ve arrived at my family’s place. Here I still have two computers left. A 1600 Mhz Pentium 4 (Willamette), and a 866 Mhz Pentium 3 (Coppermine)

I should be ashamed to inform you the Pentium 4 only has a Windows XP and a Windows 7 installation…. I should be deeply ashamed…

So… I’ve installed ArchLinux on my Pentium 4. This is a more advanced Linux distro. But I am using it at my computer in Eindhoven for a while now, and I am happy with it.

Well configuring this thing…. basic installation is really basic, you’ve got to install and configure everything. But there is a decent packet manager, so that’s not a problem. Just one little thing I forgot, is to get the ssh deamon running.

You have to allow access to it in the /etc/hosts.allow to get it working. I forgot this step…. apart from that, installation of this thing works without problems.

Now note the machine has a GeForce 4 video card, which means you need an old nvidia driver, the 96 series which are no longer working with currect kernel releases. But X works fine with the nouveau driver, so there is no problem.

Anyways…. apart from Arch… I noticed there is a new alpha version of HaikuOS available. However, on both machines, this alpha 3 version of HaikuOS randomly
freezes. Having the same problem on two machines, I think I’ve excluded a problem with the machine itself, since with other OS’es the machines run fine and with
HaikuOS they both have the problem.

Now, let’s play with some other Operating Systems. I have ArchLinux now, here and in Eindhoven… let’s try something else. The BSD family of operating systems. I think last time I’ve been playing around with those was 2008. So it’s a while ago. I’ve installed OpenBSD now on my Pentium 3 machine.

The partitioning tool, I must say, I’ve made the partitions with sysresccd with gparted. The OpenBSD installer isn’t that friendly with paritions. I remember other members of the BSD family had a better tool for that. Anyways…. partitions were made, and I told the installer to install in the OpenBSD part of the disk.

Well… before it did that, it asked me for root password and username and password for the normal user to log in, and some other questions included if I were planning to use X.

So, it installed the OS, complete with a working X server and XDM. The installed window manager is Fvwm. Let’s install some software. Yet another package manager. What’s it officially called? Packages. pkg_info pkg_add pkg_delete and the likes…. well… let’s see if I can get a xfce4 window manager instead, and install some additional software too.

Well… I said X started, right? But it started in 800×600 resolution. The monitor doesn’t support DDC, so it cannot be auto detected. Now I got xfce running, and replaced xdm by gdm by the way, I tried to start the xfce monitor setting to change resolution. Just to be told the video driver doesn’t support video outputs. I guess I have to poke the X settings manually…

By entering some horizontal and vertical frequencies, I have managed to get the monitor in the desired resolution. But I think this is enough playing for today.
Tomorrow another day, also FreeBSD and NetBSD will be my next toys.

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