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Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

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Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#31

Post by mjg59 »

userbinator wrote: post #14

I don't think these machines achieved much popularity in China either, as standard PCs were far more common and compatible with the existing software base. the keyboard and trackpad are internally PS/2. Interesting that the PC influence is still there, although I'm pretty sure a MIPS doesn't have them on port 60h/64h, or indeed any I/O ports. I remember having a similar moment of surprise when I played around with an…

> or indeed any I/O ports.

PCI has the concept of I/O ports even if the CPU doesn't. The details differ depending on whether it's PCI or PCIe, but the net effect is that whatever's responsible for putting the access on the bus exposes an MMIO window that corresponds to the the port addresses available, and generates port I/O cycles in response to accesses to that window.

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#32

Post by bigfatkitten »

walrus01 wrote: post #22
justin66 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, the SGI Fuel (also the Tezro, I think) had PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports but also offered USB ports and support for HID devices in IRIX. I have no idea whether the keyboard and mouse that shipped with those later SGIs were PS/2 or USB devices. edit: IMO there was nothing wrong with preferring PS/2 to USB 20-some years ago. Higher theoretical refresh rate on the PS/2 mouse at that time and the PS/2 keybo…

In x86 i386 world there was a good long overlap of ATX/MicroATX motherboards shipping with both PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports and also USB ports on them, starting from 1998 era Pentium 2/3 systems when USB first became commonplace and continuing until probably 2010 or so.

Industrial boards and some workstations still come with PS/2 ports today.

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#33

Post by thenthenthen »

cl3misch wrote: post #28
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #19

"However, I can find no evidence that Richard Stallman had/has a dog, or indeed any pet." According to his own disclosures, he has a fear of dogs https://web.archive.org/web/20120119135147if_/https://secure...

His long list of conditions is an interesting read. It comes off as arrogant in places, but I guess if you really travel a lot and have unusual requirements it's best for everyone to be upfront about it!

$ man stallman

Very interesting read, I like and dislike the upfrontness for the same reasons. Love it that he stresses to not buy a parrot for him as a surprise. Wonder if that happened before :/. Also, I want to cook eggplant for him now!

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#34

Post by JdeBP »

classichasclass wrote: post #12
bentley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/usr/ports/www/netsurf/netsurf-fb/

Thanks, I'll try that.

The annoying thing, looking at that, is that libnsfb (the library that netsurf-fb uses to construct its UI) once had a driver, deleted back in 2018, that could work directly with a Linux framebuffer device. This could have been easily adapted into a similar driver for wscons/wsdisplay/wskbd on OpenBSD and NetBSD.

* https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/commit/b2bb565402...

Instead, libnsfb is now layered on top of SDL in the non-X11 non-Wayland case, with all of the dependencies and extra stuff that that entails, which of course you'll have to build. SDL3 explicitly doesn't handle dumb framebuffers and full wscons, explicitly requiring foreign KMS systems from Linux on the BSDs.

* https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-kmsbsd

libnsfb then proceeds to ignore almost all of SDL anyway and draw its own UI directly, with SDL being little more than a glorified framebuffer-as-bitmap system with a couple of basic blitting operations.

* https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/blob/master/src/s...

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#35

Post by acjones8 »

mattst88 wrote: post #18
shrubble wrote: post #9

It’s tough to find them on eBay; I wonder what the right search terms are?

I think they're super uncommon in the west. I think they're also super useless, to be honest. Incredibly slow. Linux support continued to degrade the entire time I owned mine. The keyboard and display are far too small to be usable. The graphics chip accelerates basically nothing. I sold mine [1] on eBay back in October. I hope the new owner enjoys it more than I did :) [1] https://mattst88.com/computers/yeeloong/

Yoooo, small world! I'm the guy in Hawaii who bought it from you :)

I haven't done anything too exciting with it yet, still have to get around to seeing if T2 SDE works on it, but it's joined me a number of times on trips to the library for writing, and it's been delightful for that. The keyboard is surprisingly good, and it feels like a supercomputer compared to a WorkPad Z50, hah.

Thanks for having taken such good care of it!

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#36

Post by thenthenthen »

thenthenthen wrote: post #33
cl3misch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His long list of conditions is an interesting read. It comes off as arrogant in places, but I guess if you really travel a lot and have unusual requirements it's best for everyone to be upfront about it!

$ man stallman Very interesting read, I like and dislike the upfrontness for the same reasons. Love it that he stresses to not buy a parrot for him as a surprise. Wonder if that happened before :/. Also, I want to cook eggplant for him now!

Its pretty comprehensive as well, but I am struggling how any non technical person would deal with his requests? Asking my HR for a plain text ASCII flight ticket will surely throw some spanners in the cogs

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#37

Post by anthk »

justin66 wrote: post #21
walrus01 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to that there wasn't really any other viable mass-market interface that the keyboard manufacturers in China/Taiwan could standardize on. The PS/2 keyboard interface was backwards compatible with an AT keyboard through the user of a passive physical pin adapter. And USB didn't exist yet.

Oddly enough, the SGI Fuel (also the Tezro, I think) had PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports but also offered USB ports and support for HID devices in IRIX. I have no idea whether the keyboard and mouse that shipped with those later SGIs were PS/2 or USB devices. edit: IMO there was nothing wrong with preferring PS/2 to USB 20-some years ago. Higher theoretical refresh rate on the PS/2 mouse at that time and the PS/2 keybo…

PS/2 ports interrupt the CPU directly. You can't be faster than that.

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#38

Post by n4r9 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #19

"However, I can find no evidence that Richard Stallman had/has a dog, or indeed any pet." According to his own disclosures, he has a fear of dogs https://web.archive.org/web/20120119135147if_/https://secure...

That link says he's okay with dogs unless they bark angrily or jump up at people.

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#39

Post by mghackerlady »

walrus01 wrote: post #22
justin66 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, the SGI Fuel (also the Tezro, I think) had PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports but also offered USB ports and support for HID devices in IRIX. I have no idea whether the keyboard and mouse that shipped with those later SGIs were PS/2 or USB devices. edit: IMO there was nothing wrong with preferring PS/2 to USB 20-some years ago. Higher theoretical refresh rate on the PS/2 mouse at that time and the PS/2 keybo…

In x86 i386 world there was a good long overlap of ATX/MicroATX motherboards shipping with both PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports and also USB ports on them, starting from 1998 era Pentium 2/3 systems when USB first became commonplace and continuing until probably 2010 or so.

Asrock still makes some modern boards with PS/2 ports (though, it's usually a combo port)

Re: Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

#40

Post by mghackerlady »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27
em-bee wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is shocking about it?

If you want to really shock, have Midjourney make a pic of him, using a MacBook. I seriously doubt there’s a real one, out there. Haven’t heard from him in a while. I know he was suffering health issues.

Ironically, since there is a specific model of macbook (the 2008 ones iirc? IDK they were the plastic ones that came in black and white) with nearly identical internals to a well supported FSF approved laptop, you can run a full GNU stack (GNUboot, linux-libre, guix) on a mac
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