BSD Still Won't Run on IBM ThinkPads?

omega_cubed asks: "'You've successfully installed FreeBSD, now your computer is going to hang at boot up!' -- That was what I just recently suffered. I've been running Mandrake on my ThinkPad X20 for almost a year. But the lack of high speed internet connection over the summer prevented me from keeping up with the various patches/updates. Many services--sendmail, apache, etc.--were shutdown one by one because of security vulnerabilities. Recently I decided that instead of trying to catch all those patches I missed in the last few months, I might just as well do a clean install of FreeBSD. I've done what I think was all the preparations necessary: I backed-up all my files, checked all the hardwares for possible conflicts (on FreeBSD.org) and supports, downloaded the ISO image. And I decided the computer should be able to take it. Unfortunately, I didn't come across the old slashdot article reporting a possible conflict between IBM ThinkPad's BIOS and FreeBSD's filesystem. So last night, after much struggling, I installed FreeBSD. It finished, rebooted, and the computer now just hangs at bootup (here's a more detailed report on what happened). It doesn't even go into BIOS. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? Is there anyway I can update the BIOS? The diskettes provided IBM were not able to boot the computer, and I am at a loss here. Thanks."

Comments

Jesus, what the hell is up with this?

[Wakko Warner]

Let's put your booting troubles aside for a minute. I need you to answer a question for me:

But the lack of high speed internet connection over the summer prevented me from keeping up with the various patches/updates. Many services--sendmail, apache, etc.--were shutdown one by one because of security vulnerabilities. Recently I decided that instead of trying to catch all those patches I missed in the last few months, I might just as well do a clean install of FreeBSD.

So, let me get this straight: You have a perfectly good operating system that you're pretty familiar with, but it has a few security holes that you didn't (at one time) have the bandwidth to fix them, even though a bunch of one-off fixes, when downloaded one by one over time, wouldn't really have taken much effort or time to keep up with at all.

So, instead of upgrading your Mandrake install, which worked perfectly fine, or patching your install to eliminate security holes now that you have bandwidth, you'd rather destroy all that customization and work you probably put into your installation to run an operating system that you quite clearly have not researched enough, which will probably also get deleted once you lose track of security updates for it.

My question is this: are you retarded?

- A.P.