Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 18:06:08 +0200 From: Gert-Jan.Vons@ocegr.fr To: "S DAVID PULLARA" <davidp@otter.cs.yorku.ca> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD on the IBM ThinkPAD? Message-ID: <9507241606.AA27635@ocegr.fr> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 21 Jul 1995 13:34:01 EDT."
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
|One of his options is the IBM ThinkPad. Does FreeBSD install/run on
|notebooks, particularly the Thinkpad series?
It does run on a ThinkPad (I installed both FreeBSD 2.0 and 2.0.5 on a
ThinkPad 340M), but not without some modifications:
- it seems you need some boot-block modifications when you have a
2.88MB one. I only have a 1.44MB one, which works fine.
- the keyboard doesn't work with the kernel on the boot floppy.
You need to create a boot floppy with pcvt as console driver,
configured for scanset 2.
- If you want to use the advanced power management (APM), you need
to modify the kernel to only use 639K of low memory, the 640th K
is used for extended bios services/APM. Not doing so results in
page faults as soon as you activate the apm stuff.
Creating a modified install floppy for 2.0.5 is not simple if you don't
have the full srcdist, or no space/time to do a build from scratch.
I did it by
- building a new kernel with pcvt and the MFS options for the embedded
file system
- decompressing the standard boot.flp kernel (you need remove the
header first!)
- copying the embedded file system from that kernel into the one I
just compiled
- compressing the new kernel
- storing it on a boot floppy
This allows you to boot and install, but don't forget that the kernel in
the bindist won't work either, so you can't reboot from the harddisk yet.
Creating a fake bindist containing only a modified kernel, and installing
that after the real bindist worked around that problem as well. If you
installed the kernel sources, you might be able to boot from floppy and
compile the kernel on the ThinkPad, but I haven't tried that yet.
FreeBSD does run without any problems in only 4MB, but more memory helps
a lot. A kernel compile took just over one hour with 4MB installed,
the system swaps/pages all the time. Upgrading to 12MB got that down
to ~35 minutes, and still gives good response when you are doing other
things at the same time (Note that a ThinkPad 340M uses a 486SLC-2/50,
which is a bit slower than a Pentium :-).
Hope this helps,
Gert-Jan
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
J.G. Vons, Oce engineering Creteil, France | E-mail: Gert-Jan.Vons@ocegr.fr
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?9507241606.AA27635>