Thinkpads Forum

I can't find a BSD forum so I figure this is the closest related topic.

Anyone try installing FreeBSD 5.4 on a T42? Does the wireless drivers work well (iwi driver)?

http://www.pcbsd.org/forums/

Nice GUI installer for you. Works well on my old desktop.....Hope this helps.

P.S. If the forum does not look big, this project just started about a month to two months ago, and has really taken off.

Thanks for the suggestion.

When I have time, I'll load it on my T42 and see how it goes.

jspsh wrote:I can't find a BSD forum so I figure this is the closest related topic.

Maybe keep an eye on the FreeBSD Diary.

jspsh wrote:Anyone try installing FreeBSD 5.4 on a T42? Does the wireless drivers work well (iwi driver)?

See 'Project Evil'.

In a day or two I will put FreeBSD 5.4 on my X31. I will let you know how that goes. I cannot imagine that the T42 would be drastically different.

I did install BSD on the X31. First I tried NetBSD, but that required using the -current branch to get the ipw driver (PRO Wireless) working. After a day and a half of trying to compiling the -current branch and failing, I gave up and went to the tried-and-true FreeBSD:

FreeBSD 5.4-Release worked almost perfectly RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX! There were only a few major issiues. I had to disable the secondary IDE controller (for which there is no way to do so in the BIOS, but only through Windows or DOS) to get the machine to not freeze on any power-management changes or function key presses. I also found that IBM X-series laptops CANNOT USE the Suspend-to-disk function through ACPI in FreeBSD. The OS S4 sleep state did not function, and there is no BIOS S1 or S4 state support. I can suspend to RAM and resume with no issues. I still also cannot figure out how to properly undock the notebook from teh media slice (any help please?).

Speedstep works perfectly. I didn't care to try the modem, which I think neds tweaking in the drivers to configure properly. However, the ipw support worked just fine with some minor tweaking necessary.

IMPORTANT: The BIOS will incorrectly report the hard drive size to FreeBSD. This is actually good! The hidden recovery partition remains completely hidden. However, I recommend that you set up a dual-boot system by first resizing the NTFS partition to be smaller and then using the extra space for FreeBSD. This will allow you to recover without issue the Windows default install; the recovery process rewrites the first partition, so make sure that the Windows partition is the first one.

I still have tweaking to do of course. I havent gotten the trackpoint scrolling to work yet, but I haven't tried to do so either. I also still have some minor issues with the notebook freezing on occasion. I haven't tried to figure out yet what is causing this. In addition, at present, there is no TCPA (security chip) support in FreeBSD. This is probably not a big deal though for most users.

heh, are we grouping BSD into linux now?

/me sees potenti

revolutionary_one wrote:heh, are we grouping BSD into linux now?

/me sees potenti

Only because this site has no BSD topic.

I now have everything working on the X31 in FreebSD 5.4-STABLE. The trackpoint scrolls properly and the forward and back buttons work great. The only issues that remain are with the suspend to disk problems and the security chip not being supported yet

NihilDeNominibus wrote:I now have everything working on the X31 in FreebSD 5.4-STABLE. The trackpoint scrolls properly and the forward and back buttons work great. The only issues that remain are with the suspend to disk problems and the security chip not being supported yet

What did you do to get the forward/backword and trackpoint to work?

If you want to install FreeBSD 5.x on T42, you can take a look at my little page about this topic at

http://freebie.miraclenet.co.th/notebook/t42/setup.html
and
http://freebie.miraclenet.co.th/notebook/t42/index.html
It is little outoff date (I now running 5.4) but may provide an useful information