Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:13:25 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: jon@spock.org, crossd@cs.rpi.edu Subject: Re: FreeBSD won't run on newer IBM laptops Message-ID: <v04210100b5f96e6024fa@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <xzp7l7we12y.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> References: <xzp7l7we12y.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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At 10:03 PM +0200 9/28/00, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: >[bcc: to -mobile and -chat] As is mine... >The BIOS on newer IBM laptops freezes solid when it finds a >FreeBSD partition (what we call a slice) on the harddisk >(apparently because it thinks it's a suspend partition and >tries to read it). IBM tech support had the following to say >about this (after a longish struggle to make them admit the >problem existed): Here at RPI, the freshman laptop is the new IBM ThinkPad T20. Some people on campus have also bought the A20. As far as I am aware, once we got a driver for the new ethernet card which was in our T20, we have no problem installing and running FreeBSD on it. I know we have at least 30-40 students on campus who are running this way on T20's. Maybe 1 or 2 who are running on A20's. I have noticed the reports from people in freebsd-questions about problems with the T20 being completely unusable after installing freebsd. My best guess is that in our case, all our students would be running freebsd in a dual-boot situation. Many classes here use software which is included in the initial Win98 install that we have for students, and it would be foolish (for our students) to completely remove Win98. So, the first partition remains the win98 partition, and we install freebsd into a second partition that we create via PartitionMagic. I encourage people to voice their opinions with IBM, of course, but if you already OWN a T20, and you would like to use it with freebsd, then you might want to try setting it up with a dual- boot configuration. My second guess is that we (RPI) were just plain lucky... :-) > > There may be a future update to the BIOS of this > > machine that will allow the machine to recognize > > the 165 partition type. I've been told that at a > > minimum they will at least allow the machine to be > > booted up without freezing. Does this effect partition-types other than 165? Has anyone tried a dedicated OpenBSD, NetBSD, or even BeOS install on a T20? (just to see if those partition types also confuse the BIOS). It might be that we should not say "recognize type 165", but instead should say "recognize a WINDOWS partition, and if there IS NO WINDOWS partition, then do not look for a windows-suspension partition". --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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