FreeBSD 7.x with Thinkpad X200

[Russell Jackson]

Peter Hofer wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I consider buying a Lenovo IBM Thinkpad X200 (Montevina) and would like to run 
> FreeBSD 7.1/amd64 (or for now, RELENG_7) on it.
> 
> So far, I have not been able to find any information on running FreeBSD on 
> this particular laptop, only a thread about using it with OpenBSD from the 
> misc at openbsd.org mailing list (with dmesg): 
> http://www.mail-archive.com/misc@openbsd.org/msg66846.html
> 
> Does anyone have experience with FreeBSD on this laptop?
> 
> (It seems the X200 and T400 are not so different, so I would appreciate 
> comments from T400 owners as well!)
> 
> I am particularly interested in the following:
> 
> 1. Will the on-board 10/100/1000 Ethernet card work with em(4)? According to 
> the openbsd-misc post mentioned earlier, it is an 82567LM chip, which is not 
> listed explicitly in the manual page. Although I would prefer to use em(4), 
> Intel itself also provides a driver binary for FreeBSD 7.x, has anyone tried 
> it?
> 
> 2. As far as I know, no driver is available for the Intel 5100 and Intel 5300 
> wireless LAN adapters, but Lenovo also offers another adapter named "ThinkPad 
> 11b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Express Adapter III". In the past, similar 
> adapters had an Atheros chip. Should I expect this adapter to be supported by 
> ath(4) or go for an ExpressCard or USB solution instead?
> 
> 3. Will SpeedStep work with cpufreq/powerd? (According to a follow-up to the 
> openbsd-misc post, a patch is required to make it work on OpenBSD.) Also, 
> will suspend/resume work?
> 
> 4. This may depend more on xf86-video-intel than on FreeBSD: Can the desktop 
> be easily cloned or extended to an additional display device connected via 
> VGA? This is very important to me since I plan on using the laptop for 
> presentations too.
> 
> 5. Can I expect the components of the X200 UltraBase docking station to work 
> out of the box, in particular a UltraBay slim optical drive, the USB ports, 
> the DisplayPort and the Ethernet connector?
> 

I posted recently about my experience with the t400.

7.0 doesn't boot at all with ACPI enabled which means you might as well forget about it.

I had some luck with a 8-CURRENT snapshot from July; it booted, but the installer busted
due to tar being broken. There was no August snapshot released for reasons I forget now,
but a new September snapshot was released that I have yet to try.

Unbuntu Hardy works pretty well[1] on it though which is what I've been running in the
interim.

[1] there are a few minor problems with xorg video that can be fixed by compiling a more
recent xorg-intel driver.

-- 
Russell A. Jackson <raj at csub.edu>
Network Analyst
California State University, Bakersfield

Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life.