Lately I found a HP Compaq TC1100 Tablet-PC for free!! So, you know what that means. It’s time for installing FreeBSD on it! It has a Pentium M CPU, 512M of DDR RAM, 40G IDE HDD, a NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M GPU and a Stylus.
I grabbed FreeBSD 14.4 Release i386 iso from FreeBSD’s website. And flashed it into a USB using:
Then I booted up the USB and started installation. I used entire disk as UFS with guided partitioning. Then I added base-dbg, kernel-dbg, ports and src and started the installation. The Ports only took 1 hour to de-compress (Next time I’ll use git to get ports…)… But still after that it completed successfully. I choosed random-pid and clear-tmp options. After the installation I added this packages:
# pkg install xf86-video-nouveau git vim xorg acpi_call xf86-input-wacom
Then I added this to /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf:
With TWM it uses only 96MB of RAM. After that I tried to work on getting Wireless to work. It is a bit messy. Normally that era laptop/mobile computers has a psychical Wireless switch. But this one manages it manually. I found this page for installing Debian on this device and I took a look at the Kernel Patch that they linked. Of course it is a dead link so I used Wayback Machine to look at it. This is the download link of that patch so you can take a look at it too. The Patch works by adding a driver that interacts with the ACPI on this TC1100 tablet, specifically targeting the WMI (Windows Management Interface). When the user echoes “on” into the procfs file, the driver translates this into an ACPI method evaluation called WSBA. According to the patch, the WSBA method takes two integer arguments:
State: 1 to turn it ON , and 2 to turn it OFF.
Index: 1 for the Wi-Fi , and 2 for Bluetooth.
That’s why I installed acpi_call package. Then I loaded acpi_call to kernel using “kldload acpi_call” and then I added
to /boot/loader.conf
I tried to find my exact ACPI path using:
And then I used this command to turn on my Wi-Fi adapter:
And then create file /etc/rc.d/acpi_wifi with following content:
Note: If your ACPI path is different then mine, then you should change it in the acpi_wifi rc script too. You can use this with devices that use similar wireless ACPI Management.
And then add this to /etc/rc.conf to start this everytime system starts.
And I added this to /boot/loader.conf for ipw Wi-Fi driver to work:
Then run this commands to create wlan0 on rc.conf:
# sysrc wlans_ipw0="wlan0" && sysrc ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP"
Then added my SSID and Password to /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
After a reboot I finally saw the Network light running. And when I ping to freebsd.org, It worked! I haven’t tested the speeds yet but don’t expect much out of it. I think it’ll max to 12mbps or something like that. I couldn’t get stylus to work but other than that it is great. With this massive RAM and CPU, I’ll test a lot of things in the future. But for now, it’s just an old Laptop/Tablet with FreeBSD 14.4 RELEASE. I won’t do a table cause I don’t think no one will use this and download FreeBSD just for fun (other than me). But I can say that Screen, Keyboard, Wireless(With tweaks), Sound, GPU and psychical ports works. This 23 Year old thing is 5 years older than me, but I loved this great device. But of course this is a hobby device.