NetBSD on a ThinkPad 760ELD reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa64 · 2022-01-11 00:34 Hello! I recently acquired a ThinkPad 760ELD and I would like to put NetBSD on it. It has 16MB of RAM right now (I do want to upgrade though) and a Pentium processor. [Full system information can be found here.](https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:760ELD) Has anyone tried running NetBSD on one of these (or any other 760 series ThinkPad) before and, if so, what was it like? Is there anything I need to look out for? Thanks! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dressupgeekout · 2022-01-11 00:50 I don't see any reason why it must not work. But at the same time, I'd be surprised if the typical installation procedure worked perfectly with all the default settings. It is possible that the GENERIC kernel might be too heavy, or includes incompatible features which you'd need to go out of your way to disable. 16 MB of RAM is pretty small, but I'm sure you're aware of the, uh, vintage nature of your machine. There's even a thinkpad(4) driver in NetBSD but I doubt it actually applies in this situation. [https://man.netbsd.org/thinkpad.4](https://man.netbsd.org/thinkpad.4) Edit: to be clear, I don't have such an old ThinkPad, these are just general pointers for old PC-compatibles off the top of my head ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa64 · 2022-01-11 01:45 Ok, thanks for the info! I do plan to hopefully max out the RAM at 72MB sooner rather than later, which should help some things at least. I think the biggest struggle will be installation, as I have no floppy drive and the CD drive is broken (not that I could boot directly from the CD drive anyway). I'm sure I could find some workaround for that issue though. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dressupgeekout · 2022-01-11 04:41 Oh you can't boot from CD-ROM at all? When I saw the tech specs and it mentioned that it had a CD-ROM drive, I was thinking this shouldn't be \*too hard\*, but, uh, dang, good luck, this just got way more difficult. This thing doesn't have Ethernet, does it? Booting the NetBSD installation media over the network is a potential option. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa64 · 2022-01-11 04:51 It doesn't have Ethernet built-in, but it *does* have PC card slots and I actually have a NIC in there right now. I do have a few ideas for how to go about this, The first one being somehow throwing the installer onto a partition on the boot drive (in this case it will be an SD card) and using that to install to the rest of the drive. Then I will probably work some partition wizardry to take the installer partition off and expand the other partitions to fill the space. There are other ideas, but a lot of those rely on me getting rather uncommon accessories (such as the external floppy drive that could be had, or an internal one for that matter). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dressupgeekout · 2022-01-11 05:16 Sophisticated! Good luck ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa64 · 2022-01-11 05:24 Thanks! I'll need it xD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- humanleftswatch · 2022-01-11 09:27 [16MB is technically possible](https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBS D- 9.2/i386/INSTALL.html#NetBSD/i386%20System%20Requirements%20and%20Supp orted%20Devices) but you need to install manually, as far as how it will run, I have a thinkpad 600x, with a Pentium III that runs NetNSD just fine, of course it is a bit more modern ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa64 · 2022-01-11 15:23 Ohhh, thanks! I hope to upgrade the RAM before installing it, which might help things. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- noradis · 2022-01-12 02:11 I installed NetBSD on an old 90s-era laptop last year (Toshiba Satellite Pro 445CDX). It had a Pentium MMX and 144 MiB RAM upgraded from 16 MiB stock. The i/o ports had very little power. A USB Wi-Fi dongle I had didn't see any networks even right next to the router. I figured out it was a power issue when a PCMCIA ethernet card finally managed to connect with a 6 inch ethernet cable. Anything longer than that just couldn't make it. I've been told that is due to the motherboard wearing out, and that a powered USB PCMCIA hub would solve the problem, but I haven't really bothered. Other than that it works fine. The install went off seamless other than the above as-of-then undiagnosed issue preventing internet setup. It was surprisingly fast, too. Git was horrendously slow, but the basic Unix tools and even a simple window manager with xterm were at least somewhat useable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa64 · 2022-01-12 02:53 Ok, thanks for the info! I have a PC Ethernet card, so hopefully I can use that. It's a 3Com Megahertz card, idk how support for those is under NetBSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dressupgeekout · 2022-01-13 03:37 I guess ex(4) and ep(4) are the relevant drivers? There seems to be nonzero support for them, at least https://man.netbsd.org/ep.4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa64 · 2022-01-13 11:51 Ohhh, thanks! Sadly my card isn't an Etherlink III, so it doesn't look like it'll work >.> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dressupgeekout · 2022-01-14 07:06 It might work. The man page's list of devices is just a guideline, not the law on the matter. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa64 · 2022-01-14 19:02 Ohh, good to note! Thanks :3