FreeBSD 5.3 on Thinkpad X40

[Bengt Ahlgren]

Khairil Yusof <khairil at apdip.net> writes:

> Has anybody gotten FreeBSD 5.3 to run ok on a Thinkpad X40?

Sorry for continuing an old thread...  But I'd like to share my
experience of 5.3R on the X40.  By large, I think it works very
nicely, but there are a few issues:

I can't use a kernel with device apic.  If I do, the machine works
without problems until the first suspend.  When resuming, it looses
ad0, which makes it a bit unhappy...  The mouse gets very very
sluggish, so I suspect some interrupt problems.

Switching to the external screen is not flawless.  The pointer to the
start of the video memory gets offset, and you see a grayish band at
the top of the screen.  A work-around that resets this is to run
"xrandr -s 0".  The same happens if you just close the lid (not
suspending) and open again.  There is also not (as of xorg 6.7.0)
support for having both the internal and external screens on
simultaneously, which is annoying when doing a presentation.  You also
need to disable the hardware cursor to get a mouse pointer on the
external screen.  Put this in the device section of your xorg.conf:

        Option      "SWCursor" "yes"

When it comes to the built in wireless, I have had much better success
with the ipw driver (http://damien.bergamini.free.fr/ipw/) than NDIS.
Ipw works very nicely, also with WEP, but there seems to be some
side-effects to the system, because sometimes after I unload the ipw
module, it does not recognise any PC card.  It just says:

pccard0: Card has no functions!
cbb0: PC Card card activation failed

regardless of which card I insert.

Bengt