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FreeBSD Now Runs On IBM T20/T21 ThinkPads
Wolverine writes "IBM has finally seen the light and modified the BIOS on their T20/T21 laptops so users can now install FreeBSD without worrying about turning their machine into a paperweight. Although the official fix is listed as a fix for "System can not boot from a hard disk with partition ID of n5h.(n is 1 or greater)", they may have well just posted "You can install FreeBSD so stop whining". ThinkPad T20 bios can be found here and T21 bios update can be found here."
ROFLOL!
I myself can find more than 100 people in my mailbox alone!
More to the point, if there were just "100 people", IBM would just have stuck to there "not supported" excuse and that would have been it.
If they decided finally to produce a patch even though FreeBSD is "not supported" and is not part of IBM strategy in any way (Linux was affected too at first, but they produced the patch pretty fast once IBM Linux people got in touch with IBM Thinkpad people), it's because they effectively felt the bite in their pockets.
From what I have seen on the few mailing lists I subscribe to every time this issue came up, that doesn't surprise me at all.
Not that I, personally, intend to buy a Thinkpad any time soon. It was once considered by many FreeBSDers among the best laptops in the market, but Open Source depends on standards, and IBM's failure to follow standards is too glaring to ignore.
(8-DCS)
It is sad. FreeBSD has 15-20% of the "Open Source OS Market". Had they impacted any Linux distro that had 15%-20% marketshare, do you think it would have taken IBM this many months to fix the problem?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
NetBSD and OpenBSD were not affected since they use different partition ID's, so FreeBSD was the only victim of this particular IBM screwup.
It's excellent to see large companies such as IBM supporting projects like FreeBSD in this way. Does anybody have anymore information on the specifics of the problem? Was FreeBSD the only operating system affected? If my memory serves correctly, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD 1.3.3 used the same partition ID.
Yes, IBM doesn't have enough to test, getting '95/'98/ME/NT/2000 to work, devices, docking stations, pcmcia cards, printers, scanners, displays, dvd players, assorted software, modems (for each country they sell thinkpads), OpenGL issues........ in the grand scheme of things, a few machines that can't load BSD yet, aren't that important to most people, and it doesn't mean it will never work, but these things take time. Believe it or not, most of IBM tech support are probably unix people and slashdot readers, I bet they have a big linux box they all play on, and have their own internal linux mailing list.... you don't always see what happens behing the scenes.