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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

If you don't mind: which laptop models do you run it on and how is the performance compared to other OSes?

I found openbsd ran horridly hot and sluggish on my thinkpad so I've been trying to find a laptop that will work well with it.

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Lenovo ThinkPad W520 = my main

Lenovo ThinkPad T440s = a clone of my main

Both work great. I had some issues before OpenBSD 5.9 but since 5.9 everything is wonderful, which is why I finally switched over 100%.

Doesn't run hot. Only a miniscule slower than my souped-up super-fast Arch Linux was on the same laptop, but that's a fair trade.

Happy to answer any questions and offer any advice. Click my username here and get my email address from my HN profile.

Sent. Thanks!

I'm also happy to help where I can.

Does it run on those old SPARCs?

Ha! Hi Jeremy. Can't believe you remember that.

Sold those big Sun machines with the company, unfortunately.

I recently installed it on a Lenovo X1 Carbon 2nd Gen. The only headache was the Intel wifi chipset needing proprietary firmware (easily obtainable after install, but I wasted a bunch of time trying to get it working on install only to learn I really didn't need it despite thinking I did). Other than that hiccup, literally no other OS issues at all and no custom tweaking needed to get a solid setup in place.

my lenovo yoga only comes with wifi (no rj45) that's not detected during openbsd install.

could you please share where you get firmware for lenovo? thx

My recommendation is to do the install using 'disk' option rather than 'http' skipping verification as needed. Then you don't need to worry about the firmware during install. The installer's ramdisk is only 2mb, so the 675k firmware for the wifi doesn't fit. Yes, you can have the firmware on a second USB drive, but as the installer unmounts all mounted volumes it takes extra steps that's more hassle than it's worth. Once you complete the install, you'd normally use `fw_update` to get the firmware, but as you are caught in a catch-22, you'll need to grab it from here [0] from another machine and then extract to /etc/firmware on your own manually.

[0] http://firmware.openbsd.org/firmware/5.9/

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