Guest post by MeeGo is a Linux-based operating system designed by Intel and Nokia for netbooks and smart phones. Installing MeeGo on an Eee PC 1000 netbook is quick slick and easy. I found the user interface to be colourful and stylish with many quirky animations. MeeGo’s features are easy to discover and it is fast and responsive.
Underneath it all though there is still just a netbook. That means I’m left facing a display screen that has no significant weight behind it. I am left typing on a undersized keyboard that has no life. All of these undesirable features can however be fixed by adding 9kg (~20lbs) of VT320 video terminal. So that is what I did.
Connecting the video terminal to the netbook was fairly straight forward. Starting from the VT320 video terminal I used a Parallel to Serial Port converter plugged into the RS232 cable from a Lego Mindstorms set. The other end of Lego cable was plugged into a RS232 to USB adapter connected my netbook. (You could go straight for a Parallel to USB adapter cable, but I personally would not want to miss out on some excellent Lego.) The USB adapter uses the USB FTDI sio driver, which is built in to Meego. The serial port for the video terminal appears as /dev/ttyUSB0.
There were two software changes needed before I could reboot onto my video terminal. First I installed all the ncurses packages.
sudo yum install ncurses*
Next I added the following line to the /etc/inittab file, so that the Init process will attempt to start a console login for my video terminal.
vt01:235:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 19200 ttyUSB0 vt300
Finally I shutdown.
The video above shows the MeeGo VT320 video terminal start up. It takes 17 seconds from pressing the power button to a login prompt on the video terminal. That includes 11 seconds for the BIOS, 1 second for bootloader and a further 5 seconds for MeeGo to get its act together.
The original host system for my VT320 video terminal was a DEC VAX-11 circa 1990. The VAX ran VMS or UNIX/32. VMS is now OpenVMS and it is useless on most hardware including all netbooks. Unix on the other hand has many useful descendants. Few people would be surprised that a cheap modern netbook can boot up faster a mini computer from thirty years ago. The pleasant surprise for me is that it was so simple to set up a thirty year old video terminal on a modern light weight host system. MeeGo has not forgotten its Unix heritage.
Next I need some decent text mode software.
About the author:
I was turned to a Linux user by Metallica ten years ago.
I would like to thank Lightning Terminals for getting me a replacement keyboard so I could finish this article.
Care to explain?
They probably came and broke all his “Windows”, they can be pretty rowdy, the bastards.
I’m guessing he’s referring to how Metallica was very outspoken against Napster. Probably lead him toward the path of free (cost) software because he didn’t like paying for digital copies? Just guessing.
You’re not far off with you guess.
I formatted my hard drive in order to get ride of the hidden registry setting that Metallica required Napster to put on my computer. The windows registry annoyed me because I felt Metallica had more control over my PC than I did. To top it off I couldn’t reinstall Windows with the disk supplied with the PC, because I had upgraded some of my hardware.
I’d been dual booting with Mandrake, I’d bought a box set complete with a printed manual. So I gave up on Windows and stuck with Mandrake for a while.
Here is the link, for those of you who dislike these darn embedded ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MFDws9po00
You should probably be able enable faster POST in your bios. Now it takes most of the startup time, which slightly detracts from the wow factor
.
I wish I could shorten the BIOS startup on my main system (my first experience with a Gigabyte Core2Duo system). A full 15 seconds is devoted to initializing the JMicron SATA controller, and I’ve found no way to reduce it thus far. The rest of the startup is less than five seconds.
If not for that issue, I’d have a ~16 second boot to Haiku, ~45 seconds to Windows XP and ~25 seconds to OS X Leopard.
Now that my Ubuntu on SSD starts in little over 5 seconds, I’ve really started to hate the default BIOS, as it takes more time to start that up than the OS.
I’m really thinking about looking for a machine which can have it’s BIOS replaced with coreboot (linuxbios).
I’ve never been much impressed by what BIOS-writers have produced.
i remember me and som friends playing on a vt320 or vt340 on a alpha a 10years ago. my friend coded so it could draw mandelbrot and also a spinig cube. the terminal could either put a pixel or draw a line and so the code got a real nice optimisarion by just drawing lines instead of putpixel.
If you forwarded X to your terminal.
NCurses, semi-vim-like music player.
It’s fantastic.
Emacs. Just do it.
What can Emacs do? Yes.
tmux. Remember GNU Screen?
tmux is what Screen always wanted to be.
rtorrent.
aria2c
I recently upgraded my Eee PC 901 to MeeGo just to see what it was like. At first I was like “Cool, it just works!” but then I had wierd problems with Flash videos not starting, I got confused by its open-application metaphor, and I realized that it was a PITA to install OpenOffice (or much other normal software for that matter)–and after a half hour of fiddling around I decided to replace it with Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Best decision I ever made.
MeeGo has potential for appliance-like devices, and it has nice pleasant graphics and animations, though it is still too buggy and unfinished for real adoption. But for anyone who wants anything approximating a real desktop PC experience, this isn’t it.
I do it in 7.3 after grub -started- to load (bios excluded). 17 second is not very impressive.
Gentoo, parallel OpenRC, 5400rpm HDD, 3 years old C2D and udev and net/ssh/cups/avahi after agetty. With some more hacking (with busybox instead of bash) I could probably cut an other 2 seconds, but it’s too hard work, 7 sec is ok. Xorg is logged in in 13.4 second. With XfbDev and choped down libX11, I could go down to 9 seconds, but GTK performances would suck, even if Qt is fine.
Edited 2010-07-06 00:28 UTC
I haven’t read something with this developed a sense of low key humor in a long time. Nicely done.
The article has mentioned the netbook’s lack of screen resolution. I have played around with a number of solutions. Ubuntu’s netbook remix isn’t bad, but I favor two other solutions: KDE 3.5 and LXDE.
KDE 3.5 is lighter weight than the current 4 series, but it has the ability to hide the task bar, and remove the title bar and window borders for any program.
LXDE is still lighter weight, and has an “undecorate” command in every window menu. Coupled with a similar ability to hide the task bar, and LXDE is a superb desktop for a netbook.
Some day I will have to try MeeGo.
…and KDE3 is dead.
I know it was forked, but they have to maintain Qt3, KDElibs(3), and all the applications.
KDE4 isn’t that heavy, really, and it’s speeding up gradually.
While I personally don’t use it (I’m a StumpWM user who lives in Emacs and the zsh), I think that KDE4 is an amazing achievement.
Plasma also has a full netbook interface ready. Plasma is the closest thing free software has to the iOS api.(resolution independent, can fit in a variety of shapes/positions etc.)
The 4.0 release was a disaster, and it wasn’t until 4.3 that I was willing to recommend it to anyone.(and my hatred of GNOME left me not recommending Linux for a while).
More than that, there is Debian Lenny, which a) runs quite well on many netbooks, and b) will likely support KDE3 for another year-and-a-half.
I tried 4.3 fairly extensively, but haven’t gotten around to trying 4.4.
I’m not quite so radical, but I find that I don’t much need fancy stuff (like plasmoids) on my desktop. I never even use the “home” launcher, so I tend to like the spare simplicity of LXDE.
I will put that on my todo list.
For me 4.3 was still something of a flop. That said, the new KDEPIM packages work well, and I continue to use some of them.
As for Gnome, I like Linux Mint’s implementation, but that’s because it looks a lot like KDE3.
On my 901, if I do a special primary partition of 8 or 16 MB with a certain file system, I can tell the BIOS to “fastboot” and I don’t see that EeePc BIOS screen that you’ve got.
The computer then spends only ~5s on a black screen for BIOS as you power it up.
I quote from: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC_1000HE
the last partition is a 50MB partition that the Eeepc BIOS uses to store some data to abreviate the POST of your netbook.
I whole-heartedly recommend keeping the fourth partition whatever you do. Those 50 megabytes saves about ~7 seconds of boot time. Provided you’re using the HDD that comes with your 1000he, all that needs to be done in order to keep the quick post working after you wipe is to leave partition 4 alone.
If you delete the EFI partition by mistake, you can restore Boot Booster by creating a 50MB primary partition at the end of your hard drive. Label it as EFI (0xef) from within fdisk. The contents of the partition are not important as it is only a caching area for the BIOS.
Thanks for the information.
I’m going to give that a go.
I am pretty certain that the partition must be FAT formatted. It’s a rule for EFI. I have no idea how the BIOS would manage to write data into an unformatted partition in any standard manner. If they did it would make nonsense of the EFI partition type.
A VAX-11/730 would boot VMS 3.something in about an hour. Fortunately, you didn’t have to do it very often. As far as the “VAX-11” nomenclature, it was still being used in 1990, but DEC was working diligently to get people to just say “VAX”, as well as trying to get people to stop calling them DEC. Ironically, they succeeded in the latter effort – by folding up and getting merged into HP. No one calls them DEC now. 🙂
A VAX-11/730 would boot VMS 3.something in about an hour. Fortunately, you didn’t have to do it very often.
Damn straight. On the -11/730 I used, there was a good chance the R80 would throw a belt when you spun it up. We tended to leave it running for that reason.
I used a Parallel to Serial Port converter plugged into the RS232 cable from a Lego Mindstorms set. The other end of Lego cable was plugged into a RS232 to USB adapter connected my netbook. (You could go straight for a Parallel to USB adapter cable, but I personally would not want to miss out on some excellent Lego.)
I don’t understand this bit. The VT320 is a serial terminal. Why would you need a parallel port and to what would you attach it on the VT320?
Edited 2010-07-06 16:27 UTC
well it is not but it uses a db25 connector wich the parallell port also uses. old pcs used a male db25 for serial and female db25 for parallell. some old cabels had it’s use for both parallell and serial connections.
and also other computer manufactuers had their own standards sun put two ports in a single female db25connector.
so yes it is a serial port but some old parallell extension cord could most likley be used. or it actuly was a serial cable but he called it parallell becus of the db25 connector
Edited 2010-07-06 16:47 UTC
There’s a parallel port on the back of my VT320 video terminal.
I have left a picture of the connections at
http://goo.gl/GZxC
I stand corrected. It’s a DB25 connector.
Edited 2010-07-06 16:45 UTC
it is not. its DB25 (“full”) RS232 http://vt100.net/docs/vt320-uu/chapter1.html#S1.3
The original host system for my VT320 video terminal was a DEC VAX-11 circa 1990. … Few people would be surprised that a cheap modern netbook can boot up faster [than] a mini computer from thirty years ago.
Very cool article. But isn’t 1990 twenty years ago? Have I been asleep for ten years and woke up on July 7, 2020?
1990 is indeed only twenty years ago. I’m not certain which machines would still be referred to as “VAX-11” in 1990; I think by then they had gone onto monikers like “VAX 8210” and “VAX 8600”.
Thirty years ago, the VAX-11/780 had to load its microcode and bootstrap from an 8″ floppy.
Round about 27 years ago, machines like the VAX-11/730 loaded microcode and bootstrap from a tape drive connected over RS-232 at 19.2K baud. A netbook definitely boots faster than they did.
You can turn that netbook into a VAX or PDP11 as well.
Run 4.xBSD, System V, VAX/VMS — er OpenVMS, V7 Unix, RT11, RSTS/E, RSX11.
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php