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Running NetBSD on an IBM ThinkPad 380Z

Thursday January 2, 2025. 10:12 PM , from OS News
Launched in 1998, the 380Z was one very fine ThinkPad. It was the last ThinkPad to come in the classic bulky and rectangular form factor. It was also one of the first to feature a huge 13.3″ TFT display, powerful 233MHz Pentium II, and whopping 160 megs of RAM.

I recently stumbled upon one in perfect condition on eBay, and immediately thought it’d be a cool vintage gadget to put on the desk. I only wondered if I could still use it for some slow-paced, distraction-free coding, using reasonably modern software.
↫ Luke’s web space

You know where this is going, right?

I evaluated a bunch of contemporary operating systems, including different variants of BSD and Linux. Usually, the experience was underwhelming in terms of performance, hardware support and stability. Well… except for NetBSD, which gave me such perfectly smooth ride, that I thought it was worth sharing.
↫ Luke’s web space

Yeah, of course it was going to be NetBSD (again). This old laptop, too, can run X11 just fine, with the EMWM that we discussed quite recently – in fact, bringing up X required no configuration, and a simple startx was all it needed out of the box. For web browsing, Dillo works just great, and building it took only about 20 minutes. It can even play some low-fi music streams from the internet, only stuttering when doing other processor-intensive tasks. In other words, this little machine with NetBSD turns out to be a great machine for some distraction-free programming.

Look, nobody is arguing that a machine like this is all you need. However, it can perform certain specific, basic tasks – anything being better than sending it to a toxic landfill, with all the transportation waste and child labour that entails. If you have old laptops lying around, you should think twice about just sending them to “recycling” (which is Western world speak for “send to toxic landfill manned by children in poor countries”), since it might be quite easy to turn it into something useful, still.
https://www.osnews.com/story/141466/running-netbsd-on-an-ibm-thinkpad-380z/

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