FreeBSD on a 15 year old laptop

[meine]

Yesterday I successfully finished installing FreeBSD 11.2 with XFCE and CWM on a 15 year old HP Pavilion ZE4300. About one year ago I started with FreeBSD to keep old but well working hardware alive. And it Works, it's Great Fun!

Many TNX to all that contribute(d) to this rock solid operating system!

And if you might get lost with installing: just follow the Handbook. It really works.

 

[kpedersen]

I still regularly use my Thinkpad T23 ~2001 "vintage" as my irssi / nethack client. The battery is shot but FreeBSD has certainly kept it alive

About 5 years ago I tried to install Debian on it but it failed. The text-mode installer itself required more ram to process the package list than the machine had.
I also notice that the FreeBSD powerd acpi stuff works (1.2 Ghz down to 800Mhz) at idle. Whereas on Linux the scaling governers had long since forgotten about the poor little pentium 3

 

[meine]

I tried to install Debian on it but it failed. The text-mode installer itself required more ram to process the package list than the machine had.

The absolute power of FreeBSD (and maybe other *BSD as well) IMHO is that the basic install is only the basic, even the package manager needs to install itself at first use. You'll have to think beforehand what you want to have added. Besides that it is a nice way to set up your computer, it also trims down needed resources. And when you want to have the heaviest system possible you can make it.

It's Freedom of Choice.

Besides other issues with Linux ---and this is by no means a rant--- all distro's are working hard to make installs and upgrades as easy as possible for the (below-)average user, and they are doing it very well. The downside is that an always-working-distro needs to have a lot of resources that are not needed for your machine, possibly slowing down performance, possibly also on stability.

It is a good thing that computers are getting better over the years. But I suspect that more RAM, faster CPU's and larger storage lead to bulkier operating systems and software. Then (nearly) all the gain on hardware evaporates. Downscaling always was one of my favourite pastimes.

 

[Deleted member 30996]

The absolute power of FreeBSD (and maybe other *BSD as well) IMHO is that the basic install is only the basic, even the package manager needs to install itself at first use. You'll have to think beforehand what you want to have added. Besides that it is a nice way to set up your computer, it also trims down needed resources.

That's what it's all about. I have a limited number of programs I build from ports on a regular basis and leave it at that.

I have this T400 and a T61 running side by side ATM. sysutils/screenfetch shows 543 packages on the T61 and 546 packages for the T400, the one I use most. I'm not certain the difference on this one but all my machines, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, are basically set up the same way.

 

[PacketMan]

The absolute power of FreeBSD (and maybe other *BSD as well) IMHO is that the basic install is only the basic, even the package manager needs to install itself at first use. You'll have to think beforehand what you want to have added. Besides that it is a nice way to set up your computer, it also trims down needed resources. And when you want to have the heaviest system possible you can make it.

It's Freedom of Choice.

Besides other issues with Linux ---and this is by no means a rant--- all distro's are working hard to make installs and upgrades as easy as possible for the (below-)average user, and they are doing it very well. The downside is that an always-working-distro needs to have a lot of resources that are not needed for your machine, possibly slowing down performance, possibly also on stability.

It is a good thing that computers are getting better over the years. But I suspect that more RAM, faster CPU's and larger storage lead to bulkier operating systems and software. Then (nearly) all the gain on hardware evaporates. Downscaling always was one of my favourite pastimes.

Bullseye!