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Lately I found a HP Compaq TC1100 Tablet-PC for free!! So, you know what that means. It’s time for installing FreeBSD on it! It has a Pentium M CPU, 512M of DDR RAM, 40G IDE HDD, a NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M GPU and a Stylus.

I grabbed FreeBSD 14.4 Release i386 iso from FreeBSD’s website. And flashed it into a USB using:

doas dd if=FreeBSD-14.4-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso of=/dev/da1 bs=1M conv=sync

Then I booted up the USB and started installation. I used entire disk as UFS with guided partitioning. Then I added base-dbg, kernel-dbg, ports and src and started the installation. The Ports only took 1 hour to de-compress (Next time I’ll use git to get ports…)… But still after that it completed successfully. I choosed random-pid and clear-tmp options. After the installation I added this packages:

# pkg install xf86-video-nouveau git vim xorg acpi_call xf86-input-wacom

Then I added this to /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf:

Section "Device"	Identifier "NVIDIA GeForce4"	Driver "nv"EndSection

With TWM it uses only 96MB of RAM. After that I tried to work on getting Wireless to work. It is a bit messy. Normally that era laptop/mobile computers has a psychical Wireless switch. But this one manages it manually. I found this page for installing Debian on this device and I took a look at the Kernel Patch that they linked. Of course it is a dead link so I used Wayback Machine to look at it. This is the download link of that patch so you can take a look at it too. The Patch works by adding a driver that interacts with the ACPI on this TC1100 tablet, specifically targeting the WMI (Windows Management Interface). When the user echoes “on” into the procfs file, the driver translates this into an ACPI method evaluation called WSBA. According to the patch, the WSBA method takes two integer arguments:

State: 1 to turn it ON , and 2 to turn it OFF.
Index: 1 for the Wi-Fi , and 2 for Bluetooth.

That’s why I installed acpi_call package. Then I loaded acpi_call to kernel using “kldload acpi_call” and then I added

acpi_call_load="YES"

to /boot/loader.conf
I tried to find my exact ACPI path using:

acpidump -dt > dsdt.asl && cat dsdt.asl

And then I used this command to turn on my Wi-Fi adapter:

acpi_call -p '\_SB.WMID.WSBA' -i 1 -i 1

And then create file /etc/rc.d/acpi_wifi with following content:

#!/bin/sh# PROVIDE: wifi# REQUIRE: FILESYSTEMS# BEFORE: netif# KEYWORD: nojailname="acpi_wifi"rcvar="acpi_wifi_enable"start_cmd="acpi_wifi_start"acpi_wifi_start(){	echo "Applying Custom ACPI Call to enable Wireless Card..."	/usr/local/bin/acpi_call -p '\_SB.WMID.WSBA' -i 1 -i 1}load_rc_config $namerun_rc_command "$1"

Note: If your ACPI path is different then mine, then you should change it in the acpi_wifi rc script too. You can use this with devices that use similar wireless ACPI Management.

And then add this to /etc/rc.conf to start this everytime system starts.

acpi_wifi_enable="YES"

And I added this to /boot/loader.conf for ipw Wi-Fi driver to work:

legal.intel_ipw.license_ack=1

Then run this commands to create wlan0 on rc.conf:

# sysrc wlans_ipw0="wlan0" && sysrc ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP"

Then added my SSID and Password to /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicanteapol_version=1ap_scan=1fast_reauth=1network={  scan_ssid=1  ssid="myssid"  priority=5  psk="mypsk"}

After a reboot I finally saw the Network light running. And when I ping to freebsd.org, It worked! I haven’t tested the speeds yet but don’t expect much out of it. I think it’ll max to 12mbps or something like that. I couldn’t get stylus to work but other than that it is great. With this massive RAM and CPU, I’ll test a lot of things in the future. But for now, it’s just an old Laptop/Tablet with FreeBSD 14.4 RELEASE. I won’t do a table cause I don’t think no one will use this and download FreeBSD just for fun (other than me). But I can say that Screen, Keyboard, Wireless(With tweaks), Sound, GPU and psychical ports works. This 23 Year old thing is 5 years older than me, but I loved this great device. But of course this is a hobby device.

Using Wi-Fi on FreeBSD is a bit hit or miss. For example some ThinkPads uses Realtek, Mediatek or Qualcomm wireless devices. Or MacBooks in other hand, uses Realtek and some users may give up on FreeBSD just because of that. That’s because not all of us wants to use an external USB Wi-Fi card or Ethernet plugged in, some of us don’t mind it. But I’m one of those who doesn’t like that extra dongle, even if it’s very very small. So I tried to find an alternative to it. And I found it. I used this alternative on my ThinkPad T480 which I daily-drived with FreeBSD around a year (last year), and it works perfect. I didn’t used any Ethernet cable or USB Dongles and I’ll not use them now too. Wifibox is the solution. Wifibox basically creates an Alpine Based Minimal VM using bhyve and runs it on background. And uses PCI-Passthrough to get Wireless working. It uses Alpine Linux and Alpine is using all of the standart Linux Kernel Drivers. So, if your wireless works on Linux, then it’ll work here just like on FreeBSD!! That’s a great thing to have and I have an AX201 Wi-Fi card which iwlwifi supports at max 270mbps (And sometimes Kernel crashes under long usage I don’t know why yet.). But when I use wifibox to use wireless on my device, it works like a charm! And I mean it. The only downside is that you can’t use lagg when you use wifibox, or maybe I just didn’t find out how. But that’s alright to me cause I don’t use it either way. Enough talking. Let’s get started.

1st Step: Setting up a network using your phone or ethernet cable just for installation.

You should have internet connection to download it from pkg. But you already know that. So how can we do it? You can either have an ethernet cable or just use your phones cable that supports data transfer and use it as an USB Tethering device.

Android devices generally use the urndis(4) driver.

Apple® devices use the ipheth(4) driver.

Older devices will often use the cdce(4) driver.

Note: Some recent Pixel devices may use cdce(4) drivers. So if urndis(4) does not work for your Android device, then try cdce(4) too.

You can load them using these commands. If it says Module already loaded to kernel, then you are good to go.

# kldload if_urndis# kldload if_cdce# kldload if_ipheth

And now you have to enable USB Tethering on your device. On my Android device, it’s on Network & Internet/Hotspot & Tethering/USB Tethering. Your device may vary. After that you can use bsdconfig(8) and then on the Networking section, select network cards and select the network device that has the name of your tethering driver.Then you just jave to Disable DHCP and re-enable it and save the changes. Than after you ping for example 8.8.8.8 you’ll see that it connects to it.

2nd Step: Installing wifibox

It’s pretty simple. You just have to type:

# pkg install wifibox

And now you have wifibox installed!

3rd Step: Configuring the wifibox

I’ll give you what you should add to /etc/rc.conf, /boot/loader.conf and /usr/local/etc/wifibox/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf files.

Firstly you should enable the Virtualization on your BIOS. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT OR IT’LL NOT WORK

After that you should add this to /boot/loader.conf

hw.vmm.amdvi.enable=1

And after that you should add these to the /etc/rc.conf file.

ifconfig_wifibox0="SYNCDHCP"wifibox_enable="YES"devmatch_enable="YES"devmatch_blocklist="if_iwlwifi if_iwm if_iwx if_iwn if_wpi if_iwi if_ath if_ath_pci if_uath if_otus if_rtw88 if_rtw89 if_rtwn if_urtwn if_rsu if_bwn if_bwi if_ral if_run if_rum if_mt76 if_mwl if_malo if_zyd if_upgt if_wi if_wn"# This disables all of the Wireless driver modulesbackground_dhclient_wifibox0="YES"defaultroute_delay="0"

And then you should your PCI device to /usr/local/etc/wifibox/bhyve.conf

You can find this by executing “pciconf -lv | less” command. And find the one that says Wi-Fi or Wireless and note that. For example: if it says none@pci0:58:0:0: is the Wireless device, then you should note the numbers without the pciX number like 58/0/0. And then add this number to the /usr/local/etc/wifibox/bhyve.conf file (Find the line that says “passthru=”)

passthru=58/0/0

And Lastly, Create the wpa_supplicant.conf file on /usr/local/etc/wifibox/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicanteapol_version=1ap_scan=1fast_reauth=1network={ ssid="myssid"  psk="mypsk" }

4th Step: Voila!

And now, You are ready!! You just have to restart your Laptop or PC to start enjoying your Laptop/PC with FreeBSD! If anything goes wrong, you can ask me on the comments! I hope this solves your problem and you can use FreeBSD like you want.

I bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 last month and I just loved it. It has 2 USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 / Thunderbolt 3, a USB 3.2 Gen 1, a HDMI 1.4b and a Headphone / microphone combo jack (3.5mm) on the left side of it. On the other side, It has an Always-On USB 3.2 Gen 1 port and the power button. I used to have a ThinkPad T480 and a ThinkPad T470s before and they both have an Ethernet Port but this one doesn’t have one. This is sad because I love networking and home-labs, and the external Ethernet Adapter is like a pain in the ass. My older thinkpads have great support on FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but this X1 Carbon is a bit different. It has 2 speakers on top and 2 speakers on the buttom and out-of-box only the top 2 speakers work and the bottom ones (THAT’S SIGNIFICANTLY LOUDER THAN THE TOP ONES) doesn’t work. But, when I added this lines to the /boot/devices.hint and it worked like a charm. Note: This is my laptop’s nid config so it might not work on your device, however it’ll probably work on your gen 8 and probably works on gen 7 and gen 9 too.

hint.hdaa.0.nid23.config="as=1 seq=0"hint.hdaa.0.nid20.config="as=1 seq=1"hint.hdaa.0.nid33.config="as=1 seq=15"

However Microphone uses DMIC and Intel sof-firmware so it doesn’t works on BSDs. It sees microphones as nids but I can’t get them working whatever I do. I have currently Fedora 43 Workstation installed on it and it works like a charm. They shipped this laptop with both Fedora and Windows. So it has really good support on the Red Hat side. And on FreeBSD, it has a problem with pulseaudio. Whenever i use a software like pavucontrol or kde-mixer, it makes a really really loud and sharp voice out of it. Other than that, it’s features like suspend/resume, Wi-Fi, GPU Drivers etc. works out-of-box. And if the sof-firmware situation is solved, then it’ll be a very very good BSD device. I heard that OpenBSD team has attempts to make sof-firmware mic and sound to work. But I don’t know if it’s true or not. If it is, then I’ll have to try it after it solves. I really like BSD systems, but the sound is important for me and because of that I can’t use this as my BSD system. But I may buy a mini-pc or a ThinkPad X61s as my BSD device. Other than that FreeBSD didn’t find my IR sensor and actually it doesn’t matter much.

WiFi (Intel AX201 non-removable)Works out-of-box with iwlwifi drivers up to 270 mbps download speed.Bluetooth (Intel AX201 non-removable)NOT-WORKINGUSB Type-CWorks out-of-boxTouchpadWorks out-of-boxKeyboardWorks out-of-boxSpeakersWorks out-of-box (With some Tweaks)Headphone JackWorks out-of-box (With some Tweaks)MicrophoneNOT-WORKING

So these are my experiences with FreeBSD on ThinkPad X1 Cabron Gen 8. The installation was flawless and the experience with i3 and xfce is actually really good if you don’t use pavucontrol and use something like audio/mixertui so it doesn’t make that loud sharp noise on places like a cafe or library (Don’t ask me how did I found out that it makes that noise using all speakers even when headphones are plugged-in :[ ). I used FreeBSD as my daily-driver on my other 2 ThinkPads and if the microphone of ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 will work on FreeBSD, then I’ll continue to daily-drive it again. But for now, I’m stuck with Fedora on this beauty.

This is my first time writing a blog. And I want to write about my experiences in various topics like books, coding, operating systems, movies and anything else that I want to write about. This post will be very short cause I don’t have anything else to say. I’ll start learning lossless compression algorithms soon. When I start to learn it, I’ll write again about my experience of doing so. I just want to make my own compression algorithm like rar. But I really don’t know where should I start. I found a tutorial here. I think I’ll start with that but idk when I’ll start cause I have an exam. University exam in my country Türkiye. So I have limited time for learning things like that. I’ll write a new post after i start it.