Wow, thanks for all the great responses. I actually found a 2011-ish HP Notebook I had lying around. I cleaned it, new thermal paste and have it running now. The only real issue I am seeing is that the Wifi card is an Atheros (athn0) and while it does connect, I seem to be getting sporadic connection drops. I then have to restart the networking to reset it :(. I tried to put a different wifi card I had lying around in (intel I think), and my BIOS wouldn't accept it. In any case, I will work to get this up and running!
Thank you! Il Gio 17 Giu 2021, 7:04 AM Jan Stary <h...@stare.cz> ha scritto: > 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 > >
