Guide to OpenBSD 5.9 on Toughbook 19 mk6 and mk3

[Karl Klammer]

I'm usually running at 10-20pct brightness with occasional 40% bursts for videos

apm -A does my autoscaling and usually idles at 1200mhz (lowest settings)., except for intensive stuff like youtube
https://calomel.org/apm_control.html describes the algorithm as follows:
Apm will increase the cpu speed 50% every second if the load is over 70% usage. Once the cpu load drops under 70%, apm will decrease the cpu speed 20% every second till the cpu is at its lowest speed.

I'm happy with battery life so far, even if it's only about 70% of what Windows 7 used to do.


EDIT 20160530
I've improved on the xlock/apm solution and discovered a way for making touchscreen calibration persistent across reboots.

I couldn't find any offline GPS routing application for OpenBSD: Basically there is only foxtrotgps, which still requires a webservice and thus internet connectivity for route calculation.
Let's see if I can get MapFactor or Garmin to work with qemu-Windows .. as there is neither Wine nor Virtualbox for OpenBSD.

This OpenBSD revival has been a wonderful experience so far. HUMPPA to that.
The system has come a long way regarding hardware support, yet I still got to play around with fun stuff like AT modem commands and X11 APIs,
Just today, I rejoiced after discovering that a small perl script, which I wrote literally ten years ago, has found its way into the ports tree.

[Karl Klammer]

added section "Laptop tweaks :: GPS as Navigator" aka "If you wish to use turn-by-turn offline navigation on OpenBSD, you must first emulate the universe."

[kode-niner]

I wanted something a bit more refined ... to paraphrase Carl Sagan:
If you wish to use turn-by-turn offline navigation on OpenBSD, you must first emulate the universe.
Thus I'm running MapFactor PC Navigator 15 Free,
on top of a emulated Windows environment,
on top of Systemd,
on top of Linux,
on top of a emulated x64 computer,
on top of a barely SMP-aware research operating system,
on top of a passively cooled mobile processor.
It is about as slow as my description suggests it to be ... but it works ;-)

OK that's just slightly insane. About a year ago I heard that someone was able to compile navit natively on OpenBSD, though I cannot find that information anymore.

[Karl Klammer]

Hi kode-niner,

thanks for the link to navit, I'll look into it.

EDIT: Didn't have much luck with compiling navit so far. cmake works great, but make stops at 4% for bin/navit with some dynamic library issues. Massaging Makefiles and asking Aunt Google wasn't useful so far..

[kode-niner]

Hi kode-niner,

thanks for the link to navit, I'll look into it.

EDIT: Didn't have much luck with compiling navit so far. cmake works great, but make stops at 4% for bin/navit with some dynamic library issues. Massaging Makefiles and asking Aunt Google wasn't useful so far..

Which libs crapped out?

[Karl Klammer]

OpenBSD doesn't support the "-ldl" flag, so I first had to remove it from ./navit/CMakeFiles/navit.dir/link.txt and
./navit/maptool/CMakeFiles/maptool.dir/link.txt.
Next thing I see are a couple of undefs and issues with freetype fonts, even tough freetype is installed via pkg_add and detected by cmake.
cmake and make output attached.

[kode-niner]

Just going by memory here since I haven't touched Open or FreeBSD in ages, but since cmake reports freetype is installed but not freetype libraries, it might be looking for libfreetype.so.something somewhere.

[Karl Klammer]

FYI, I gave up on navit.
I rather wait a few minutes for my qemu-mapfactor hack to bootup on those rare occasions that I need navigation,
than invest more time attempting to port some software that may or may not suit my needs.