Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

True enlightment only comes from a truly free computing experience, probably! And while there is no nerd who lacks an opinion on Richard Stallman personally, likewise let none claim he does not practice what he preaches. Why, the very laptop in front of him was selected deliberately because it can operate with no binary blobs and no firmware you couldn't examine or replace with your own, and runs his choice of fully libre operating systems. The fact it has a Chinese MIPS64 derivative in it was undoubtedly just more compound on the heat spreader.

Now, in my case, the fact that it is a MIPS-family system meant I certainly needed one in my unusual laptop collection. And since it can run OpenBSD ...

... it seemed like a good way to get nerdsniped in two ways by one computer: since I mostly run NetBSD as my BSD and server operating system of choice, I figured this was also a good way to learn OpenBSD on a highly portable netbook using an unusual platform. As usual, of course, the whole shooting match turned out to be a much longer journey than I'd anticipated, and my typical insistence on deviating from the beaten path (such as forcing it to run from the SD card slot and trying to build a browser from source) made it more so. But before we embark upon it, let's talk about why there's a Chinese MIPS derivative in this thing in the first place.

Bobby Prince has died

Bobby Prince, '90s FPS game musician extraordinare and longtime id Software associate, has died at 81. Now, early on, there were things like Commander Keen and Eat Your Vegetables, which were cute and amusing yet almost completely orthogonal to his later output. Correspondingly, his transitional work in Wolfenstein 3D was fine (especially The Ultimate Challenge) but clearly all of a particular genre, and his otherwise solid contributions to Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad ended up overshadowed by Lee Jackson's (exhibit A: Grabbag; exhibit B: Prince's main theme but Jackson's KISS OFF).

Doom, on the other hand ... well. It's not just that these were solid gamer tracks, it's that they sounded good on just about anybody's sound card. We had high quality MIDI on Mac while you schlubs struggled with Sound Blaster Pros and it still didn't sound like a$$. That's talent. While everybody will name At Doom's Gate (E1M1) as his best, I claim it is only merely his most memorable, and solely because everyone on the whole stinking planet has played it at least once. Instead, I proffer I Sawed The Demons (E2M1), Untitled (E3M1), and the reworked Wolf 3D holdover Evil Incarnate (Doom II MAP31) as his heaviest and meatiest, Donna To The Rescue (E3M2) as his funkiest, The Demons from Adrian's Pen (E2M2) and They're Going To Get You (E2M4) as his creepiest (I love the "car going out of control" feel to E2M2, as Prince himself called it), and Sign of Evil (E1M8) as the first track that legitimately had me scared as the doors slide open and the Bruiser Brothers emerge to kill. If that one didn't make you wet your pants back in the day, maybe this remix will. The Doom port for PlayStation didn't want to pay him royalties so they cheaped out and brought in Aubrey Hodges. Good music but hardly worthy of the Master, and to an otherwise excellent port's detriment.

I'd say rest in peace, but given the infernal subject matter that just doesn't seem adequate.

Building a serial and VGA "everything console"

Some of our recent (and some upcoming) projects are oriented to systems with serial consoles, but it's been getting pretty old dragging around old CRT terminals or tying up Mac laptops with a serial port. I'd like something that's self-contained, a little more portable and a bit less heavy. I'm sure there's any number of all-in-one setups you can buy to do this, but I'm cheap, so I'm going to DIY it.

We'll start with this used, slightly abused IBM 1U console that I got for $120 (shipped) from eBay, add a terminal emulator, and put all the fixin's on.