I just found out the hard way that FreeBSD effectively abandoned my Atom netbook starting with 14.3.
The upgrade from the now-EOL 14.2 succeeded, except the drm, i915kms, and other kernel module friends were removed from the i386 pkg repos, & graphics/drm-61-kmod, the only drm-kmod port, refuses to try building on i386.
Looks like this is the end of the Unix-likes road for still fully working x86 PCs.
I don't want to put the preinstalled Windows 7 back on this netbook because it's too underpowered. It came with Windows 7 Starter, I bought and activated a Windows 7 Home Basic license using its Windows Anytime Upgrade, and that turned out to bloat the already sluggish experience.
Since the way back is a poor vintage computing experience, the way forward might be Haiku. I just wonder if it supports the weird graphics resolution 1024x600.
Oh, I forgot to say: The netbook is an eMachines eM250 with its stock 1 GB RAM, Seagate 256 GB 5400 RPM HDD, & Windows COA sticker so faded from less than ordinary wear that only the pre-slop Microsoft logo is intact.
Haiku is beta, but it installed successfully, with only a partitioning barb keeping it from being a completely smooth experience. It recognized the graphics chips, used its native resolution, & didn't ask or try to use any other. It also connected on wifi like a desktop OS should.
There's no Firefox for it, not even for download, but its preinstalled Web browser (WebPositive) is refreshingly not Chrome-based. Its User-Agent string is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Haiku R1) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) WebPositive/1.3 Version/14.1.2 Safari/605.1.15
It also kernel panics during boot on occasion, dropping me into an almost Sun-like black text on white background screen and prompt. I don't understand any of it, but it gives me so much data I feel like I could, and do something about it.
It also hangs on occasion during shutdown, where it's supposed to send the ACPI power-off command.
It isn't just good, it's beta!
