[CDBUG-talk] What to load?

[Jonathan Franks]

Steve Moon wrote:

>I've recently freed up an IBM T20 thinkpad, 700MHz, 256MB RAM, 12GB
>hard drive, mostly dead battery.
>
>What BSD should I load up on it? I tried the dragonfly bootable iso
>which seemed to start OK. In terms of using it as a laptop, which BSD
>is best to play with?
>
>  
>
I'm running FreeBSD 5.3 release on my laptop, and it's working great...

>I haven't loaded a *nix style system on a laptop in ages, and back in
>the day pcmcia support, power management, etc. was all a black art
>that mostly didn't work. I get the impression that some things, e.g.:
>suse linux will get things configured very well. Any BSDs that are
>known to work well on this kind of hardware?
>
>  
>
I've heard that most of the thinkpad models are very well supported, 
though I don't have one myself. Everything works on my Dell Inspiron 
8000, though I'm having a bit of an issue getting the sound to work on 
bootup (it works fine if I load it manually, but when set to start on 
boot it just doesn't...) In any event I am very pleased with the overall 
performance of 5.3 in this regard. 

>And yes, I know I could RTFM, but isn't the whole point of this group
>to talk about this kind of stuff?
>
>  
>
Absolutely.

>Any thoughts appreciated.
>
>  
>
I think that FreeBSD will probably give you the fewest headaches on set 
up, but I haven't had much opportunity to play with Dragonfly, yet.

-Jonathan