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FreeBSD 7.0 on a T43

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 7:50 pm
by Scoob
Anybody here gotten acpi management working on their T43 under FreeBSD?

My sleep is more like death (John 11:13).

Before I bore you with a lot of demsg's and kldstat's, let me know if you have a Thinkpad with similar hardware to a 2668-46U and are running a sleepable FreeBSD.

Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 7:30 pm
by Davemci
Is ACPI the only issue you've had with FreeBSD? Not too many people using it for laptops that I'm aware of.

Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 9:21 pm
by Scoob
Davemci wrote:Is ACPI the only issue you've had with FreeBSD?
ACPI is the only insurmountable issue I've run across so far. Once I can close the lid, have the computer sleep and wake it up again, then I'll be home free.

So far, I've managed to surmount (not necessarily in this order).
1. The install.
2. Building the kernel.
3. Rebuilding world.
4. The wireless.
5. GNOME.
Davemci wrote: Not too many people using it for laptops that I'm aware of.
I'm getting that impression... not much traction on a Google. I'm amazed that there is more activity in getting OSX running on the Thinkpad versus the BSD's.

I hate to give up because I really like the robustness and well-documented organization of the platform. Closest thing to an iSeries (I'm an old 400 programmer) that I have ever worked with.

I've tried the various Linux distros and find the whole scene to be a little chaotic. I would load PC-BSD except that I despise KDE.

I pinged this fellow for help, but he's gotten rid of the T43.

Somewhere, somebody's got to have gotten this working.

Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 9:43 am
by sarumont
I have suspend working on my T43p in FreeBSD 7.0. I always had it work once then not work again, though. The fix for that was to disable APIC. Stick hint.apic.0.disabled="1" into your loader.conf, and that will do the trick.

YMMV, though, as it would appear as if your machine just goes to sleep and doesn't come back?

As far as the rest of the hardware goes, I have everything else working except the fingerprint scanner and bluetooth. I'm about to give some time to fprint. It looks like (from the freebsd-mobile mailing list) fprint works for the T43p and x61. There quite a few on that list with Thinkpads running FreeBSD. ;)

I've also had no success with getting DRI going. I haven't invested a lot of time into it, though. It worked under Linux, so I would imagine that it should work under FreeBSD, too. (using the open-source ati driver).

Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2008 10:48 pm
by sarumont
Also, I remember (and recently found again...) circumstances where sleep from X == death. There is some xorg.conf-fu that needs to happen to prevent that:

Code: Select all

    Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"      "1"
    Option "CPPIOMode"                  "true"
    Option "VBERestore"                 "true"
Just stick those in your "Device" section and give it a whirl.

Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2008 11:23 pm
by gator
Can one of you guys make a small tutorial on the installation of BSD on thinkpads if you find any free time, and maybe it put it here or on thinkwiki? It would be very useful ...

Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2008 11:54 pm
by tarvoke
desktopbsd or pc-bsd is pretty straightforward. vanilla freebsd can be a bit more ... interesting. but that's not too unusual.

Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 11:00 am
by sarumont
gator wrote:Can one of you guys make a small tutorial on the installation of BSD on thinkpads if you find any free time, and maybe it put it here or on thinkwiki? It would be very useful ...
What is this...'free time'... of which you speak? :)

I had actually planned on writing something like that anyway, but time is a very limited resource. I'll try to bump it up on my TODO list, though, and remember to post here when it's complete. :)

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 9:02 am
by Scoob
gator wrote:Can one of you guys make a small tutorial on the installation of BSD on thinkpads if you find any free time, and maybe it put it here or on thinkwiki? It would be very useful ...
There are a quite a few tutorials for installing BSD's on the web; both for the Thinkpad and generic installs. They're great to help you get started. What is missing is a dedicated Thinkpad BSD OS forum to help you sort out the problems that arise.

This is the best place to get Thinkpad specific support, however the BSDers are swamped by all the penguin traffic.

Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 7:05 am
by kulka
I've been running FreeBSD on my T43 for at least 2 years, currently struggling with 7.0. Almost everything is working like a charm. The exceptions are suspend/resume (my tp goes black and horribly beeps from time to time) and fingerprint (this is rather software issue - fp works great in console, under X the application doesn't even show). I wish the 3d environment work better (faster) and fn-f7 key combination be captured.