i wasn't happy, i was just less pissed off (part 2)

i ordered an oqo a while ago and it finally arrived yesterday. i played around with windows and then installed openbsd on it, but while i was fixing drivers and making things work under openbsd, the whole thing broke. i was recompiling xorg when the thing suddenly shut off for no reason. after that it never came back on. i tried removing the battery, pushing lots of buttons, yelling at it, etc. but it will not power back on. the keyboard lights for Fn and ALT light up, the fan/hard drive whirrs for a second, and then the lights turn off and the noise stops. then it repeats. it's been doing this every few seconds since this afternoon when it stopped working.

i called oqo technical support and the guy made me do the same stuff i already tried before he realized that it wasn't going to do anything. he filled out an rma and now i have to wait for the rma to be approved, then get an e-mail, then print out a shipping label, then ship the unit back to them, wait for them to fix it or whatever, and send me another unit. so that will probably be another few weeks. asldfkjalfdskfdsa.

it is/was a very cool piece of equipment. the keyboard is small but usable by typing with the thumbs, and the mouse, while a bit jumpy at first, is easy to get used to. wireless worked at work, but not at home; i'm guessing it's because the antenna on it is not that strong.

i had to re-install windows xp after repartitioning the drive and installing openbsd. oqo includes the xp installation cd, but for some reason it doesn't include any of their drivers. so after installing xp, it comes up as 800x600 which cuts off the bottom 120 pixels. that makes it almost impossible to step through the post-installation setup process, because the 'next' button is in that cut-off area. i eventually figured it out by using the tab key and randomly guessing where the button was to click on off screen. none of the other devices worked correctly either, like the ethernet or the wireless, which meant i couldn't download the drivers to fix the display, ethernet, and wireless. eventually i used erik's mp3 player as a usb hard drive and that somehow worked. once windows was (re)setup correctly, i started playing with openbsd some more.

the built-in keyboard does not work under openbsd after the kernel loads for some reason. pressing keys does random things, from entering wrong characters to repeating the character forever until you hit another key. i had to use a usb keyboard for the interim. the mouse was not recognized due to some weirdness in how the keyboard responds to the probes on its aux port by the pckbd driver. looking at the linux driver hack, i did a similar one to get it to attach the pmsi0 device.

the integrated wireless works, although wep did not in 3.7-release. the 10/100 usb ethernet that attaches when you plug in the "docking" cable works just fine.

x worked, although it came up in 640x480. the mouse worked after i fixed the pckbd driver, but the cursor was messed up so 'sw_cursor' needs to be enabled. i was recompiling x to make the siliconmotion driver support the 800x640 resolution when the thing died. once that was done, i was going to start on trying to figure out what the keyboard was doing. that would have made the entire device pretty much openbsd compatible. 802.11b wireless, usb, x, sound, bluetooth (just had to enable it in GENERIC), all working.

now i must wait until i get a replacement device...