For my birthday this year I was given a brand new Asus EeePC 1000HE, one of those fancy new netbooks. It came pre-loaded with Windows XP which didn’t last too long. I was aware going into it that OpenBSD wouldn’t recognize the wireless card so I thought I’d give FreeBSD a shot.
The challenge to getting FreeBSD on this system is that it doesn’t have an optical drive and FreeBSD doesn’t have a really easy way to load the system from a USB disk. You’ll need to bootstrap your own following instructions you find at the FreeBSD EeePC Wiki.
I installed FreeBSD 7.2 from the bootonly image. The ethernet device was recognized but not marked ‘Up’ for some reason so I had to use the emergency shell to bring it up but after that I was able to perform a network install and then upgrade to CURRENT.
It looks as though the Atheros 9280 is supported pretty well, though you need to follow the man pages for creating the wlan0 device to be able to use it, I’m also using WPA2 on my home wireless network. powerd also works, here’s my rc.conf that, along with wpa_supplicant will bring up the wireless device and enable powerd.
wlans_ath0="wlan0" ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP" powerd_enable="YES"
and the relevant entries in /boot/loader.conf:
snd_hda_load="YES" acpi_asus_load="YES" acpi_video_load="YES" hw.acpi.reset_video="1" hw.acpi.sleep_button_state="S3" hw.psm.synaptics_support="1"
There are a few things that I have not tested… like the camera, and I can confirm that as of right now suspend does not work. Power usage is fantastic, however.
It did take a little configuring to get Xorg to work but it does nicely, with direct rendering here is my xorg:
And my dmesg:
Thank you so much for this post I have been debating on whether to pull the trigger on a 1000HE because my goal is to run FreeBSD on it. So just to clarify the wireless works perfectly fine after you complete the necessary steps above?
Thanks again!!!
Yes, I have not had it stop working at all… in fact, my only beef with it is Suspend, if I could get that working everything would be perfect.
I’ve got BSD installed fine, but I have no idea how you got wireless to work. It even says on http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee that the 1000HE card isn’t supported, doesn’t it?
Other than that, thanks for the good advice!
It “Just worked”, see my dmesg and you’ll notice the lines referencing the ath0 device attach. After that you’ll need to follow the man page to create the wlan0 device which you’ll use from a userland perspective to actually configure and connect with.
Note that I also mentioned that I used FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT… the wireless card was not recognized by 7.2.
The Asus Eee PC FreeBSD wiki page has not been updated in some time, take whatever it says with a grain of salt.
It turns out not all 1000he eees are created equal, there are at least 3 different wireless cards… Mine needs the 2860 ralink driver (not the atheros one), a driver that FreeBSD does not have.
I spent some time messing around with the thing, got bored and installed SuSE Linux. Sure, it’s not quite as cool as BSD, but SuSE has out of the ‘box’ support for my WiFi card, webcam, SD card reader, suspending, and hibernation. I’m a hardcore programming geek and I appreciate BSD, but I think it’s more of a desktop/server thing.
I’m happy with my current system and am only posting to warn other potential 1000he BSDers: YOUR WIRELESS CARD MAY NOT BE SUPPORTED BY FREEBSD!!!*
Thanks for your prompt response and helpful article though (the X stuff works great!).
*However, OpenBSD does have some support for the ra2860 driver. I looked at porting it (seems possible), but realized I’d rather just run linux.
It drives me crazy when vendors change things up without changing model numbers. To be clear, I have had success with the Atheros 9280 and have no experience with the 2860 driver.
I would tend to lean towards Ubuntu/Debian for a Linux distro… their Ubuntu Netbook Remix is fantastic… I tried it out before loading FreeBSD and everything worked great.
I’ll always pick BSD first, but to each his own.