Tag: wincor nixdorf

OpenBSD on a Beetle

The Beetle is a low-spec machine. Very low. But OpenBSD works very well on it.

After the install comes customisation.

Key packages:

FLWM — the light but easy-to-use window manager

surf — the web browser that gives the modern web, JavaScript and all, without using all your memory (goodbye to Firefox, and I never said hello to Chrome)

bash — I have used it on Linux, and I just find bash easier

vim — my editor of choice

Ted — for that little bit of word processing

netsurf, links2 — for the web when I don’t need JavaScript

git — for the odd thing I want to install from source

mrxvt — my favourite terminal

alpine — for mail

All these except mrxvt can be installed using pkg_add. So I’ll just list the mrxvt prpocess:

  1. Download the source
  2. Extract it to a directory and go there
  3. ./configure --with-save-lines=65535 --disable-xrender --enable-xft
  4. doas make install
  5. In .profile, I just put alias mrxvt='mrxvt -sl 65535' to make it use all those saved scroll lines.

Done. Oh, and surf is really great. You don’t have to be an expert to use it. I just created a local page of very simple HTML with all my bookmarks on it, and then in .profile:

alias mysurf='surf /path/to/bookmarks.html'

So when I run mysurf, I get my page of links to choose from. It’s great. I have a Atom 230 chip and 512 MB RAM and I can edit a WordPress page and do all that stuff that really light browsers can’t do because they lack JavaScript. I mean, surf’s not fabulously responsive on a WordPress interface page, but it is quite usable.

 

Surf