Which ThinkPad gen suits best for Net/Free/OpenBSD?

[Tasurinchi]

As the title says...

I got curious about the above mentioned OS's and was wondering which ThinkPad generation would be good to start playing with them?

I was guessing some older Core2Duo or 1 Core i gen would suits best. To start with I'd like to use hardware that is soported ootb and if I like it, learn the tricks for newer hardware later.

Thanks a lot in advance for any hints!

[Dekks]

For Free/OpenBSD roughly anything that has an ipw2200 intel wifi onward till machines 2 or 3 years old. NetBSD is really a server OS AFAIK.

[Tasurinchi]

For Free/OpenBSD roughly anything that has an ipw2200 intel wifi onward till machines 2 or 3 years old.

That new? I may give it a try in a T420/T420s probably... I was expecting it would be safer on older hardware and was cleaning up my xx00 gen machines...

Thanks for the hint!

[Dekks]

look up man iwm that covers which of the newer intel wifi chipsets that openBSD covers, but be aware that due to the intel meltdown bug and the subsequent fallout OpenBSD disables hyper-threading by default and that hits performance.

Also there is https://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html

[Tasurinchi]

Thanks! I saw the link for downloads, I was only curious which would be the easiest hardware platform.

... and that hits performance.

Top performance is not relevant for the moment, is just for toying around.

[zerotetration]

I find that the T60, X61, T61, R61 machines work perfectly with OpenBSD. I have not tried NetBSD or FreeBSD on them. I may be trying NetBSD someday soon but I am very happy with OpenBSD. Everything works, including suspend to disk, hibernate, Thinklight, sd card slot (if applicable). Extremely stable. Run for weeks at a time without reboot or shutdown (just hibernate or suspend).

In fact I just made a post in the marketplace forum offering these machines with OpenBSD installed and configured for sale. If anybody is interested please PM me. I have been using an X61 with a custom configured GUI you will find no-where else for more than a year. It meets all of my daily computing needs (online use through a browser, image management and manipulation, word processing, printing, remote server management over SSH, and more).

Will only ship to US customers, unless you pay shipping if international, in which case it probably is not worth it for you.

[crux]

I prefer FreeBSD as a desktop OS but have Thinkpads running OpenBSD, too.

I really like my FreeBSD based T61 with T7300 @ 2GHz, 4GB RAM and widescreen, but have been using my T400 with P8600 @ 2.40GHz and 8GB RAM exclusively the past few months. I have 2 T61's, both of which I got for approx $50 each delivered.

The best Idea I've had in a while was to turn my FreeBSD based X61 with T7300 @ 2GHz and 4GB RAM into a dedicated .mp3 player. It has a tiny footprint, sits on a table in easy reach of my recliner and does nothing but play beautiful music for me. I never shut it down and it's at 178 days uptime.

[axur-delmeria]

The best Idea I've had in a while was to turn my FreeBSD based X61 with T7300 @ 2GHz and 4GB RAM into a dedicated .mp3 player. It has a tiny footprint, sits on a table in easy reach of my recliner and does nothing but play beautiful music for me. I never shut it down and it's at 178 days uptime.

That's a wee bit overkill for an mp3 player.

And here I am trying to watch 720p videos on an X60F with a Core Solo 1.06GHz.

Cheers to our long-lived Thinkpads

One question about BSDs: how's their wifi card support? Some days I feel like trying out non-Linux OSes.

[Tasurinchi]

I managed to install FreeBSD in my AFFS modded X201, but I think I somehow screwed something up and Gnome is acting a little bit b!tchy... I probably need to re-install.

Which GUI would you recommend? I tried LXDE but it did not work, (or maybe I did something dumb...)

[WarMachine]

Hello,

I've been toying with BSD lately and it seems that XFCE is a good choice (not my preferred desktop environment but it works well on FreeBSD). And if you want to use a display manager, Slim works well too. For now, I have a FreeBSD on my X60t and it runs relatively well, considering it's stuffed with an old 5400 rpm hard drive.

I've also tried FreeBSD on one of my X220 and everything went fine but the laptop suddenly crashed as I was surfing using Firefox (and not the little crash, the laptop shat down without notice). I didn't reinstall FreeBSD on that machine but the latest Debian (9.6.0) and it runs flawlessly (I use LXDE or fluxbox, depending on the mood).

What I like with FreeBSD is the installation process, everything is well recognized, like the Wi-Fi (as I have lots of machines and as I'm running short on network cables, it's nice to install via Wi-Fi ). OpenBSD is nice too but not as nice as FreeBSD for a desktop OS. I haven't tried NetBSD because I wouldn't need that kind of OS. In the past, I've tried PCBSD (TrueOS nowadays) and it was not bad (with a graphic interface for the installation) but I witnessed some crashes too (on my cherished T60).

From what I read, the documentation of FreeBSD is one of a kind. I didn't need to have a look at it yet, but it's nice to know that you probably can find an answer to almost every question you should have on the OS : https://www.freebsd.org/docs.html. It's important to me, because one of the thing that irritates me with Linux is the documentation (the man pages of Debian are well done though). You find tons of informations, but it's not necessarily for your distro and it may be inadequate. That can be rather annoying for a beginner (fortunately, I'm not a beginner anymore ).

W.

[KentT]

The best Idea I've had in a while was to turn my FreeBSD based X61 with T7300 @ 2GHz and 4GB RAM into a dedicated .mp3 player. It has a tiny footprint, sits on a table in easy reach of my recliner and does nothing but play beautiful music for me. I never shut it down and it's at 178 days uptime.

That's a wee bit overkill for an mp3 player.

And here I am trying to watch 720p videos on an X60F with a Core Solo 1.06GHz.

Cheers to our long-lived Thinkpads

One question about BSDs: how's their wifi card support? Some days I feel like trying out non-Linux OSes.

Intel cards are supported very well. Atheros is not supported.