OpenBSD and laptop

Hello everyone!

I'm sorry for disturbing you and I'm a little bit uncomfortable because I'm not so active on forums and always trying to figure out something by myself (Don't want to disturb others).

I want to switch to OpenBSD, but I didn't find anything about hardware which is supported on OpenBSD (I'm not sure that I understand list of supported hardware in the F.A.Q. because there's not much about Intel).

Will OpenBSD run on a laptop with:

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4200U CPU @ 1.60GHz (x86_64, GenuineIntel)
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4400 (Integrated)
RAM: 8 GB

Or there can be some issues? (I don't care about Wi-Fi)

Thank you all for your time!

I would try booting bsd.rd there and then look at the dmesg to see what the kernel recognizes. But off hand I would guess that it would be ok.

OpenBSD is quite good at identifying hardware. I'm running OpenBSD 6.8 on my T410 Thinkpad which has a 2.4 GHz cpu and 4 GB RAM. I'm happily running XFCE 4.14.
I suggest that you do a wired install of OpenBSD if your laptop has a RJ-45 connection. On first boot-up after your installation OpenBSD will automatically download any needed firmware for your wireless NIC, graphics card, sound card, etc.

Thank you for your replies! I'll try to install OpenBSD tomorrow. Hope all will work fine!

Originally Posted by Challene Thank you for your replies! I'll try to install OpenBSD tomorrow. Hope all will work fine!

Have fun!
As you're a Slackware user you are comfortable with manually editing configuration files. On first boot-up of OpenBSD on a wired connection you should see what type of wireless firmware is being downloaded and installed. On my Thinkpad it uses the iwn firmware.
To set-up a wireless connection after I've finished downloading what I want using my wired connection I open up a root terminal and navigate to the /etc directory and remove my wired connection script.

# cd /etc
# rm hostname.em0

Then I manually write my wireless connection script. I'll give you my example (removing the actual hostname and wireless password).

# vi /etc/hostname.iwn0
join nameofwirelessconnection wpakey wirelesspassword
dhcp
inet6 autoconf
up

Save and exit. On next boot-up your laptop will connect to your wireless hotspot.

Added later. Do read up on how to set-up OpenBSD before you install it. There are some configuration files you'll need to edit in addition to what I've mentioned.

Originally Posted by hitest Have fun! As you're a Slackware user you are comfortable with manually editing configuration files. On first boot-up of OpenBSD on a wired connection you should see what type of wireless firmware is being downloaded and installed. On my Thinkpad it uses the iwn firmware. To set-up a wireless connection after I've finished downloading what I want using my wired connection I open up a root terminal and navigate to the /etc directory and remove my wired connection script. # cd /etc # rm hostname.em0 Then I manually write my wireless connection script. I'll give you my example (removing the actual hostname and wireless password). # vi /etc/hostname.iwn0 join nameofwirelessconnection wpakey wirelesspassword dhcp inet6 autoconf up Save and exit. On next boot-up your laptop will connect to your wireless hotspot. Added later. Do read up on how to set-up OpenBSD before you install it. There are some configuration files you'll need to edit in addition to what I've mentioned.

Awesome! Thank you, hitest!

I would move the wired hostname.if(5) to a back up file rather rhan removing. To find out if your wifi adapter is supported, identify the chip under your current OS, then have a look at relevant man pages online.

Originally Posted by cynwulf To find out if your wifi adapter is supported, identify the chip under your current OS, then have a look at relevant man pages online.

Yes. I neglected to mention doing a hardware compatibility check. I agree with cynwulf. It is a very good idea to find out if your hardware will work with OpenBSD.

What can I say. All works great, but I didn't tried wifi yet, because I don't use it and didn't tried to launch blender for 3D modeling yet, but I like already like OpenBSD. Only one thing I did wrong is installing OpenBSD on a whole disk instead of free space, so now I need to install Slackware again Thank you for your help!

Originally Posted by Challene Only one thing I did wrong is installing OpenBSD on a whole disk instead of free space, so now I need to install Slackware again Thank you for your help!

Cool! I have set-up a dual boot with Slackware and OpenBSD; it works great. LILO plays nicely with OpenBSD. Here's a thread I created on that subject a while back.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ot-4175579277/

Originally Posted by hitest Cool! I have set-up a dual boot with Slackware and OpenBSD; it works great. LILO plays nicely with OpenBSD. Here's a thread I created on that subject a while back. https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ot-4175579277/

Awesome! Thank you, hitest! Hope I'll be able to set up a Slackware-OpenBSD dual boot

OpenBSD doesn't support my laptop wifi As I don't want to be hard wired the choices were either to tether via my android phone, or use a external aerial ... or, what I went with, kvm/qemu boot OpenBSD using Linux.

kvm/qemu booting works great for me. 30Mbs down, 10Mbs up (restricted upload speeds by ISP).

Neat features are that you have both Linux and OpenBSD 'dual booted' ... concurrently, and you can use qemu snapshots i.e. boot, install/setup and then shutdown and subsequently boot a snapshot image of that configured setup, where any changes are lost at shutdown, so you boot a nice clean/factory fresh version each time. Try things out, mess up, and a simple reboot has it back to how it was before. Or if you want to preserve changes, just boot the base version, apply the changes and shutdown, so subsequent snapshot boots picks up those changes.

That does mean storing data/bookmarks etc. "outside" of the system, but with dual Linux/OBSD boot its simple enough to sshfs mount (or scp/ssh) between the two.