On Jun 15 20:14:14, tomvet...@gmail.com wrote: > 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.)
Every camera on every Thinkpad I have seen in the last years was supported by OpenBSD's video(1); meaning raw frames - you will need ffmpeg for the mjpeg stream. > My main concern is the > longevity that this model would have going forward. I already have a '94 You can get a Thinkpad that is 20 years younger for peanuts. > 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). On Jun 15 21:39:48, n...@holland-consulting.net wrote: > 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 Exactly. As far as this January, OpenBSD ran just fine on my R52 https://github.com/janstary/dmesg/blob/master/thinkpad-R52.20210123 but I got rid of it anyway, for reasons others have described here. > (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. Heh, that's actualy a stable source of Thinkpads for me: win users get rid of it as it cannot run their win version, but the machine itself is just fine. > Although OpenBSD doesn't support bluetooth, it doesn't get in the > way of anything. Removing the BT card seems to save a bit of battery life. > On X220 and maybe others if you particularly don't > want to have the hardware, you could just remove the daughtercard > that runs it (some people do this anyway to gain an additional USB > interface); maybe swap the wifi interface too, as some of them are > combined wifi+BT. Yes; but some Thinkpads' BIOSes contain a whitelist of sanctioned wifi cards, and will not boot with other cards. So sometimes you are kinda stuck with the original one, unless you find the exact compatibility list and get a supported card. Typically, I end up replacing a Broadcom wifi/bt card with one whitelisted iwn(4) or another. Jan
