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Getting FreeBSD 7.0 running on an IBM Thinkpad T40

November 12th, 2008 Chris Leave a comment Go to comments

I’ve been experimenting with various operating systems on my Thinkpad and have been trying to get a Unix-like system on there. I’ve played with Ubuntu but the battery life is abysmal. I can get around 3 hours with Windows XP installed and barely half that with Ubuntu 8.10 installed.

Just for grins, I decided to see how difficult it would be to get FreeBSD 7.0 working on this machine. After I was done, I decided I’d share the knowledge:

Here’s how I did it

  1. Wena
    January 27th, 2009 at 07:27 | #1

    Did you try to run xorg with radeon or ati drivers ?
    My system complete frezze when i try quit te X and go back to terminal.

    FreeBSD + T40 + Radeon Mobility 7500

  2. January 29th, 2009 at 21:09 | #2

    Wena,

    Nope, just the bare VESA driver. At the time I tried it, the DRI driver was a bit busted. I did actually build the radeon driver but my X session kept crashing and a buddy who’s a FreeBSD developer said to try it without DRI. Since it worked, I just used it from there. Didn’t try the closed source ATI driver though. I may revisit it in the near future. Thanks for your comment!

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