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My first FreeBSD laptop

~monpetit

Yesterday I installed FreeBSD on an old laptop from 2011 that's been sitting in storage. It was originally a Windows machine, but when the OS was upgraded, I couldn't get technical support for it anymore, so I abandoned it. I've used FreeBSD on servers before, but never in a graphics environment like this. I had a hard time installing drivers for the old graphics card, but eventually managed to get an Xfce desktop environment up and running.

It's useless as a Windows machine, but I've installed FreeBSD on it and it's pretty good. I wouldn't use it as a daily driver because it's too heavy to carry around, but I'm going to try it as a sub-desktop at home.

~> neofetch
``                         `       monpetit@hermes
  ` `.....---.......--.```   -/    ---------------
  +o   .--`         /y:`      +.   OS: FreeBSD 14.0-STABLE amd64
   yo`:.            :o      `+-    Uptime: 1 hour, 38 mins
    y/               -/`   -o/     Packages: 487 (pkg)
   .-                  ::/sy+:.    Shell: fish 3.6.1
   /                     `--  /    Resolution: 1600x900
  `:                          :`   DE: Xfce4 4.18
  `:                          :`   WM: Xfwm4
   /                          /    WM Theme: Default
   .-                        -.    Theme: Adwaita [GTK3]
    --                      -.     Icons: elementary-xfce [GTK2], Adwaita [GTK3]
     `:`                  `:`      Terminal: xfce4-terminal
       .--             `--.        Terminal Font: Monospace 12
          .---.....----.           CPU: Intel i5-2520M (4) @ 2.494GHz
                                   GPU: GF119M [Quadro NVS 4200M]
                                   Memory: 3476MiB / 8132MiB

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Replies

~257m wrote:

Hmmm I always wanted to breathe new life into an old laptop with a FOSS OS.

Sounds fun. All the laptop I have lying around don't have chargers for them and are effectively useless.

Good luck to you and your newish old FreeBSD laptop!

~yretek wrote (thread):

Sorry to be that guy but BSD is not Linux

~beefox wrote (thread):

big tip i've seen recently with old laptops: you can use them pretty easily as media servers!

~keystone wrote (thread):

Linux is a beautiful thing. Breathe new life into old hardware, Please do keep us updated on sub-desktop situation after a while.

~ew wrote (thread):

Congrats!

~bartender? More hot chocolate, please!

May the force be with the newly awakened laptop for a long and prosper time, right?