On 6/15/21 8:14 PM, Thomas Vetere wrote:
Hello everyone,
I was looking to get a laptop to run OpenBSD. The one I am looking at in
particular is the Thinkpad R51e (2005). I like this particular model
because it does not come with any extra hardware that OpenBSD does not
support in the first place (bluetooth, camera, etc.) My main concern is the
longevity that this model would have going forward. I already have a '94
Thinkpad that cannot run the latest OpenBSD well because hardware support
was gradually dropped during code cleanups, etc (i.e. newer versions of X11
removed support for my ancient graphics chip because it just wasn't worth
the time to maintain the code). Does anyone know, given the age of that
model, how many years I might get out of it with OpenBSD and its packaged
software before hardware support starts to drop? What is a good rule of
thumb for selecting a machine to run OpenBSD with respect to its age?
Thank you for your help!
Well...keep in mind that laptop model numbers are marketing tags,
based on what you provided, I have no idea what's actually IN that
machine. And I (and I suspect most people) can't predict what HW
will become unsupportable in the future or why.
But the machine you are looking at is 16 years old. Odds are, OpenBSD
will support that machine longer than you will find the machine useful
(assuming it is usable on OpenBSD now. If it is filled with nvidia hw,
game over). Sounds like it's a fairly limited machine -- with expansion,
MAYBE just barely enough RAM to run a modern browser, but probably not
pleasantly. Make sure it's a SATA machine, not an IDE (IDE laptop
drives are getting hard to find) and make sure you got enough RAM,
upgrading it might be expensive. I doubt this is going to be a
long-term machine for you.
And for what it is worth, I have a machine a few years newer than yours
that I've owned and dual-booted for well over ten years...except that even
though it's specs are "sufficient" for what I might want to do with Windows
on it, Windows 10 no longer supports the video hw it has. OpenBSD still
does. Surprise.
Nick.
