Joseph Choe

The New Framework

I purchased a new Framework laptop.

I’ve actually had my eye on these laptops for more than a few months. Especially coming from a decade of MacBook Pros, I love the idea of a laptop almost as repairable as my own personal computer.

If you know MacBook Pros, they’ve become almost impossible to repair. Even a simple battery replacement nowadays means I have to go to the Apple Store and ship the machine off for several weeks. Only a decade ago, I could purchase a battery online and replace it myself.

Yet the Framework promised something much more. I could replace the battery, the mainboard, the memory, even the monitor and keyboard. It was a truly repairable laptop.

I decided to take the plunge and preorder one, and it finally came this week.

Build Quality

Despite being one of the most repairable laptops I’ve ever owned, I was expecting something quite flimsy. However, it is actually pretty rigid in body, both its keyboard and monitor. And despite being light and thin, it had a good heft and weight to it.

The aluminum chassis felt nice and cool to the touch, though I think the USB expansion cards are a bit hit or miss. The USB-C expansion cards do sit flush against the body of the laptop, but the USB-A expansion cards I do go into the body a bit, leaving behind a noticeable lip that catches on the fingers.

However, other than that, I have very few complaints about the quality of materials.

Hardware Installation

Installing everything was pretty easy, with one exception.

I put in an extra Samsung 980 PRO 1TB NVMe SSD I had lying around and installed the 64 GB of DDR4 memory. I don’t really have any tasks that would require so much RAM, but I suppose I always go for future upgradeability in mind. I don’t really want to have to buy new RAM in the future, and it felt like I would rather have it and not need it and such like.

The only thing that was very fiddly to install was the WiFi card. I must have spent ten minutes getting the antennae to catch and then slowly try to insert the card, only to have them slip off anyway. After much frustration, I managed to get it on.

Disk Setup

I’ve been playing around with different operating systems on the devbox and also on the virtualization machine, including OpenBSD and Gentoo Linux. I’ve even managed to build a kernel to my exact specifications, which is something of a first for me.

However, I decided to go with OpenBSD for the machine. Additionally, I decided to encrypt my disk with a simple USB keydisk.

Disk setup is actually pretty simple, and I would recommend just following the OpenBSD FAQ. Otherwise, here’s what I did.

First I prepared the disk and initialized it:

cd /dev && sh MAKEDEV sd0
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd0c bs=1m
fdisk -iy -g -b 960 sd0

The second line writes random data and takes a long time, while the third line writes a GPT to the disk.

Then, I created a partition layout:

# disklabel -E sd0
Label editor (enter '?' for help at any prompt)
sd0> a a
offset: 1024
size: *
FS type: RAID
sd0*> w
sd0> q
No label changes.

And I did the same thing with my USB keydisk, though this time writing an MBR to the disk instead of GPT.

cd /dev && sh MAKEDEV sd2
fdisk -iy sd2

If you’re wondering, my 1TB SSD is sd0, while the OpenBSD installation disk is on a USB that’s sd1. The keydisk is at sd2.

Then I partitioned the keydisk, though I only needed 1 MB:

# disklabel -E sd2
Label editor (enter '?' for help at any prompt)
sd2> a a
offset: 64
size: 1M
FS type: RAID
sd2*> w
sd2> q
No label changes.

Once that was done, I created an encrypted volume:

bioctl -c C -k sd2a -l sd0a softraid0
sh MAKEDEV sd3
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd3c bs=1m count=1

The last line overwrites the first megabyte of the new pseudo-device sd3 with zeros.

Installation

Then, I just went through the installation of OpenBSD, careful to choose sd3 as my root disk. Honestly, there’s no reason to walkthrough it, because it’s such an easy installation process.

However, instead of using the default partition layout, I changed the swap to 8 GB. I didn’t think I needed a 100+ GB of swap, which is what happens in a default installation with a 1 TB disk. Given the size of my RAM, I think I can live with only 8 GB of swap.

Even with the 100+ GB swap, the OpenBSD default partition only utilizes about 50% of the entire disk. I still have like 400+ GB left, which I decided to keep as is.

Conclusion

And that’s my first few days with my new Framework. I don’t yet have a graphical user interface, but I’m planning on installing and configuring one next week. Whether I write about any of it remains to be seen.

Other than a few headaches with the WiFi card, the Framework was easy to get up and running. It’s quite a nice machine that I expect to be using for many years to come.