FreeBSD 7.x with Thinkpad X200

[Russell Jackson]

Russell Jackson wrote:
> 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:

I didn't address these points specifically in my first post; so, I'll do that now.

>>
>> 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?

When I booted with a 8-CURRENT snapshot, I was able to get a DHCP lease with the
integrated NIC. It showed up as em0; so, it was using the em driver.

>>
>> 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?

The 11b/g WLAN card on the T400 is an Atheros AR242x a/b/g PCIe card. I think the b/g is a
typo. It does in fact have an A radio.

The lastest HAL from MadWifi supports it, and works fine. I suspect that the new HAL for
the FreeBSD driver will also support it as well. I wasn't able to test this however.

As a side note, the integrated bluetooth also works.

>>
>> 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?

Under Linux --which is all I can vet for at this time--, all the power management stuff
works. It does suspend and resume; however, I've had strange problems occasionally that I
don't seem to have if I don't suspend/resume. So, I'd say that it's probably not reliable
enough to use dependably.

My experience has been that suspend/resume support is generally better under Linux. The
only laptop I've ever owned that would reliably resume under FreeBSD was an old Toshiba
Portege. That said, this is my first ThinkPad.

>>
>> 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.

The xorg-intel driver works very well with the integrated graphics. I'm able to use XRandR
to do all mentioned above.

>>
>> 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

The dock and bay hot swapping works fine under Linux. Again, I can't say anything about
this for FreeBSD.

I'll try to find some time to test the September 8-CURRENT snapshot this week and report
back to the list.

Overall the T400 is the best laptop I've ever owned in terms of functionality under an OSS
 operating system, power usage, heat dissipation, noise and build quality. It has none of
the heat/fan noise problems reported here with the T40/T60 series.

Also, if you do get the T400, the 9-cell battery pack comes highly recommended. I'm
getting 4+ hours out of it without any tuning to conserve power and running the screen at
~70% brightness. Take note that, with the LED backlit screen, 100% brightness hurts my eyes.

-- 
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.