This article originally appeared in the August 2000 issue of the Dæmon News Online Magazine. This is a cleaned-up version of the article with minor style edits and made it HTML5 compliant; else, the content has not been changed.
Before I go into setting up FreeBSD on my iPaq, I just wanted to give a run-down on what the iPaq is. More information about the iPaq can be found at Compaq's website.
With the recent explosion of Internet appliances, Compaq included their offering that does not have any legacy ports (ie: serial, parallel ports) nor includes any "normal" expansion slots. The name of this funny creation, with a funny look, is the iPaq.
Instead of using PCI slots or serial ports for connecting devices to the computer, Compaq decided to go with USB ports. The standard iPaq (which Compaq calls the Legacy-free iPaq) has five USB ports, three in the back and two in the front. To meet the demands of companies that have not embraced USB completely, Compaq has released a version of the iPaq with legacy ports and reduced the number of USB ports to two. The iPaq doesn't have any standard 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch drive bays, but rather has a single MultiBay that Compaq currently uses in their corporate and executive laptops. The iPaq does not include any MultiBay devices by default, but you can order several different kinds of MultiBay drives, including a 24X CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and a 120MB LS-120 floppy drive. Compaq also has a 6GB MultiBay hard drive, but it is quite expensive. You may find it cheaper just to upgrade the hard drive.
The heart of the iPaq is either an Intel Celeron PPGA 500MHz or a Pentium III FC-PGA 500MHz processor, and uses the Intel i810e chipset. As some of you might know, the i810e chipset supports up to 512MB of SDRAM (either PC100 or PC133) and includes integrated audio and video.
Note: XFree86 does not support the integrated video built into the i810 on FreeBSD, but support for it is in the works. Since I am using this as a server and X Windows is not required, this is not a concern for me. For those who were planning to use the iPaq as an X Workstation will have to wait, or use the VGA_16 server.
On the motherboard is an Intel EtherExpress 100B integrated network card. There are two IDE channels (capable of ATA/33), one dedicated to the hard drive and one for the MultiBay device.
For my own personal server, I decided to stick with the iPaq with Legacy Ports since I had a PS/2 KVM switch and didn't want to have an extra keyboard lying around. The specs on the iPaq are as follows:
Now for the fun part... installing FreeBSD!
I chose to go with FreeBSD 4.0 because of some of the updated components and the updated virtual memory system. Before I started the install, I went into the system BIOS settings and started to disable options that I did not need to use, such as USB and the on-board sound. I also had to tell the BIOS to boot off the CD-ROM instead of the hard drive.
With the FreeBSD CD in the drive, I rebooted the machine and within 30 seconds, I was ready to do the installation. I opted to pull down the files from the FreeBSD FTP site instead of installation from the packages from the CD-ROM because I knew that the ports has changed a bit since I got the CD and that I wanted to make sure that I was somewhat up to date.
I chose to go with a custom installation and proudly wiped the Windows partition that was on the hard drive. I allocated all of the hard drive for FreeBSD and created the /, /usr, /usr/local, /var, /var/ftp, /home and the swap partitions. Since FreeBSD was going to be the only operating system, I just chose the standard boot option rather than using a boot manager. I then chose the basic packages and a couple of other packages (mostly the games and additional documentation, plus crypto).
After choosing one of the FTP mirrors (ftp3.freebsd.org) and configured the network card (which was auto-detected as fxp0) with the necessary addresses, the download and install process started. With DSL, I was able to complete this portion in less than 40 minutes.
Once the download was done, I chose the necessary ports (including qpopper, Pine and links, a Lynx work-alike) and configured the machine to automatically start named and sshd. I enabled Anonymous FTP (I later replaced the standard ftpd with WU-FTPD) and set up the necessary accounts and shells. Once I was done, I rebooted the machine and crossed my fingers.
Getting the machine to the login prompt took a little longer than normal because I forgot to eject the CD. During boot-up, nothing out of the ordinary occurred except for the media and that the speed of the fxp0 adapter was set to "manual". According to my hub, the network card was running at 100Mbps and half-duplex, but I was able to ping the machine from my Windows machine. And there it was, the beautiful login prompt.
I logged in as myself and su'd to root to start making changes to the kernel configuration and some of the files in /etc. First thing first, I went and tweaked the kernel configuration to strip out anything I did not need, which included things like ISA cards and the like. The kernel compiled and installed without a hitch, and I rebooted the machine. Then after a little bit, the machine came back up and was sitting happy at the login prompt.
Next course of action, figure out how to set the network card's speed and duplex setting to auto. I read the ifconfig man page and tried to force it auto, but ifconfig would always say that the media type was not supported. Therefore, I decided to shoot over an e-mail to the freebsd-questions list and got a prompt response stating that the problem was resolved in 4.0-STABLE.
So, my next step was to make my source tree current using cvsup and build for 4.0-STABLE. Instead of following the steps that many people use to upgrade to stable, I used the method described at FreeBSDDiary.org. I let the cvsup source update go overnight since I really didn't want to sit around and do nothing and the fact that it was approaching 3:30AM PDT. When I got up, the update was complete and it was waiting for the next step; building the source. I decided that I would continue to adventure when I got some time at work.
When I had some time for breaks, I telnet'd into my BSD box and continued the update process by building and installing the updated source and files, re-built the kernel to match the new code, and used mergemaster to finish the process. I rebooted the machine when it was done (it took a while) and waited until the machine came back up, if it ever came back up. Within a couple of minutes, I got responses from pinging the machine and proceeded to telnet into the machine. I was able to log in without a problem and checked out the syslog to see if the Intel network adapter had actually set it self to auto-detect. To my amazement, it did and it actually ran a bit faster as well.
With Apache 1.3.12+PHP4 and other web services installed, my iPaq is now a nice, compact, economical, and powerful Internet appliance.
Article copyright © 2000–2010 Linh Pham. All rights reserved. Re-production of portions of this work, or its entirety, requires permission of the copyright holder.