Installing FreeBSD on old laptop

B

balanga

I'm thinking of installing FreeBSD on an old laptop - an IBM Thinkpad 600.

Anyone know if some old version will install, and if so which version?
 
You can install any recent release. The difference between those and much older versions should be minimal when it comes to processor use, and memory use can be kept to a minimum by disabling things like CAM CTL in /boot/loader.conf (kern.cam.ctl.disable=1).

The problem lies in the choice of third-party applications and this depends on your intended use of the laptop and the available physical memory.

Using it in command-line mode only should be perfectly fine. This kind of system can (surprisingly?) be used for listening to music, browsing the Internet and reading mail with multimedia/mplayer2, www/elinks and mail/mutt.

Using Xorg, some lightweight window manager (x11-wm/twm, x11-wm/fvwm2, etc.) and a single (lightweight) application at a time may work as well if the machine has 128MB of memory or more.
 
Whether Xorg will work depends on the graphics. I remember fighting with a Thinkpad 600 which had an ancient graphics system.
 
I've abandoned the idea, for the time being, of installing on my old TP600 since the cmos battery has died, and soldering the connectors to a new one is something I don't fancy doing. However I have installed v10.0 on a TP41p and it seems to work OK, although I haven't tried installing Xorg yet.
 
The T41p is only ten years old or so, should not be a problem. Some of the Thinkpad 600s were so old that it was before standard things like being able to boot from USB or having built-in Ethernet.
 
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