A long time ago I was running OpenBSD on my laptops (I have moved back to Linux since then). This page contains information on my experiences regarding running OpenBSD.

IBM Thinkpad A31P (intussusception)

About six years ago I decided to replace my old Toshiba laptop with an IBM Thinkpad A31P, and naturally I installed OpenBSD on it. However, since the laptop has quite a big hard disk (60GB), I decided to keep a small partition with Windows XP Professional. The hard disk also has a hidden FAT32 recovery partition (1GB) at the end of it, from which you can boot at startup time. I decided to keep this partition too, just in case. I used Partition Magic in order to divide the hard disk into an 8GB partition for XP, which I moved to the end of the disk just before the recovery partition, and I use the rest of it for OpenBSD. So now the entire disk looks something like this: 

What	      Type	    Size (MB)	  Start sector	  Total sectors
OpenBSD	      A6	    47338.6	  63		  96,949,377
IBM_PRELOAD   FAT32	    8564.0	  96,949,503	  17,539,137
IBM_SERVICE   Hidden FAT32  1328.9	  114,488,640	  2,721,600

During OpenBSD's installation I needed the geometrical characteristics of the free partition in order to create it, and by using disklabel I defined the following: 

Filesystem	 Size	    Mounted on
/dev/wd0a	 1.9G	    /
/dev/wd0d	 2.9G	    /home
/dev/wd0e	 40G	    /usr

My all time favorite boot manager is GAG, which handles both OpenBSD and Windows XP with no problems at all. After the installation of the boot manager, through a bootable CD since A31P comes with no floppy drive, I used Partition Magic to convert the XP partition from NTFS to FAT32 in order to be able to mount it from OpenBSD. The sound card works fine, as well as the integrated ethernet card. All the special Fn keys work since they are controlled by hardware. The DVD/CDRW combo (Matshita) works fine with mplayer and cdrecord respectively, directly from the ports tree. APM support also works with no problems both under the console and X. The only thing that doesn't work is, of course, the integrated winmodem. Another minor problem with OpenBSD 3.1 was the ATI Radeon Mobility M7 (LX) graphics card (also known as ATI Radeon Mobility FireGL 7800). XFree86 4.2.0 does not support this card. However, I had applied the XFree86-4.2.0-ati-radeon-mobility-FireGL-7800.patch patch (local copy here) by Mike A. Harris to the X source tree from the OpenBSD CD release, re-compiled and re-installed X, and configured it using xf86config. Specifically, 2D and 3D worked, DVDs (with mplayer) worked too. On OpenBSD 3.4 the M7 LX works without the need to apply the patch and recompile X, since it is supported by XFree86 4.3.0 that comes with it. Furthermore, I have a PCMCIA Lucent Orinoco silver 802.11b card which works perfectly. USB is detected and works too (tested with an external Freecom Traveller II CDRW, a Linksys USB memory stick and a Nikon Coolpix 2500 digital camera).

3.4: Kernel configuration, X configuration, dmesg output.
3.1: Kernel configuration, X configuration, dmesg output.

Toshiba Satellite 2060CDS (rejection)

My Toshiba Satellite 2060CDS has been a perfect home for OpenBSD since release 2.4. There were always only two minor problems, the winmodem that came with the laptop, and the ESS Maestro 2E sound card which until release 2.8 was not supported, but now it works with -current. If you want to see how I managed to get the sound card to work with the OSS demo driver before the 2.8 release, look here. I also have a PCMCIA ethernet card, the LevelOne EPC-0100TB, which is recognized by OpenBSD as a NE2000 compatible card and is working perfectly.

3.5: Kernel configuration, X configuration, dmesg output.
3.1: Kernel configuration, X configuration, dmesg output.
2.9: Kernel configuration, X configuration, dmesg output.
2.7: Kernel configuration, X configuration, dmesg output.
2.6: Kernel configuration, X configuration, dmesg output.
2.4: Kernel configuration, X configuration, dmesg output.

Greek language support

I have made some modifications to the pcvt console driver for OpenBSD 2.7 and to the wscons console driver for OpenBSD 2.9, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4 that implement support for the Greek language on the OpenBSD console. Also, the provided tarballs contain everything that is required in order to support the Greek language on the X Window System for OpenBSD.

Ports

When I find time I audit third party software, and contribute to the OpenBSD ports tree. My contributions so far can be found here.

Greek mailing list

I have created a Greek OpenBSD mailing list, you can find more information at http://195.130.120.12/mailman/listinfo/openbsd/.

i386-specific bootable images

I have written a couple of shell scripts that create i386-specific bootable images of OpenBSD release and current. You can find the actual images at http://195.130.120.12/~argp/OpenBSD-images/OpenBSD-release.iso and http://195.130.120.12/~argp/OpenBSD-images/OpenBSD-current.iso. The first one is updated every official release and the second one on a weekly basis (every Sunday). In order to download them you need a valid username/password. These images are only provided as a convenience to the Greek OpenBSD community. Please support the OpenBSD project by buying official CDs.

Patroklos Argyroudis, argp at domain cs.tcd.ie, http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/~argp/.
$Id: index.html,v 230002c0ecca 2007/07/12 09:57:56 argp $