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This is a list of laptops known to be working with OpenBSD.
If your laptop isn't listed below doesn't mean that it won't work, and you will most likely find a similar model that is listed below. Most laptops work very well, however some will still have minor issues.
Of those that have problems,
If you have your laptop working (or not working) and it isn't listed below, please mail www@openbsd.org so that it can be listed. Please supply as much information as possible.
| Laptop | Notes |
|---|---|
| Acer Aspire 1360 |
It comes with AMD Sempron 2800+. Running OpenBSD 3.7. Everything woks fine (mini-PCI slot, VIA S3 Unichrome PRO, VIA RhineII-2). Here is the dmesg. Here is the xorg.conf file. Contact Maxim Bourmistrov. |
| Acer TravelMate 345 |
As of OpenBSD 2.7-CURRENT, APM works. XFree86 works (800x600 16bpp). Sounds works. Contact Kevin Lo. |
| Acer Travelmate 524TEV Laptop |
APM support works fully (under console and X) PCMCIA Card support (ne0) works fine Internal Intel Ethernet Express Pro 10/100 works XFree86 with ATI Rage Mobility AGP works (1024x768, 16bpp) Sound does not work. Contact Matthias Schmidt <xhr@gmx.net> |
| Asus L8400 |
APM and suspend work completely (both in X and under console). Internal 10/100 Ethernet (Realtek 8139) works fine as well, and so does the S3 Savage MX-MV graphics chip under XFree86 4.1.0. Sound (ESS ES1989) works. The rest (PCMCIA, Infrared, USB) is untested. Contact Jan-Uwe Finck. |
| Dell Inspiron 4100 |
apmd(8) is fully functional. Integrated xl(4) works fine. Integrated auich(4) works fine. USB works fine with my mouse. Both PCMCIA slots work. The Modem does not work. Contact Robert Nagy |
|
Dell Latitude CPt
|
apm -z and -S work. Sound works. XFree86 v3 works in 1024x768x24bpp. XF4 looks better in 16bpp. Both PCMCIA slots work. USB is detected, but untested. It does not appear to work after a suspend. Here is an XF4 config. Contact Paul Wang. |
| Fujitsu Lifebook C325 |
APM works fully. Sound works when the BIOS is told to activate SB emulation mode. Everything else on the machine works. Contact Tom Knienieder. |
| Fujitsu Siemens Amilo D 7820 |
APM is not working with 3.6 (Boot with boot -c and then disable apm)
Sound works fine. For OpenBSD 3.6, you can download dmesg and XF86Config. Contact Alexander Schmid. |
| IBM Thinkpad 701C |
All features including hibernation and APM work. Contact Todd Fries. |
| IBM Thinkpad 770Z |
As of OpenBSD 2.8, almost everything works fine. This laptop does not really have a BIOS; most of the device settings, like IRQ assignments etc. have to be done through Windows. You can get the serial and infrared ports to be recognized as com* devices by playing with the IRQ assignments in Windows. Likewise for the parallel port (it's lpt2). You will need this line in your kernel configuration file for APM to work at all: option APM_DISABLE_INTERRUPTS=0 Hibernation (save to disk) works fine as long as you have a Windows partition with enough disk space (a bit more than the system memory). Suspend/resume/powerdown all work fine; however, doing hibernation while in X Window System (tested in XFree86 3.3.6) causes framebuffer corruption and it seems that the only way to recover is to exit and restart the X server; switching virtual terminals doesn't fix it. It has been suggested that switching between different resolutions might fix it. XFree86 4.0 fixes that problem, but last I checked did not have accelerated support for the driver. The best work-around is to switch to text mode before hibernating. If you enable the external monitor (Fn+F7), XFree86 3.3.6 goes into some weird rainbow pattern and eventually freezes the system (unless you switch to text mode or otherwise kill the server within a few seconds); if you switch to text mode, you have to kill the X server (switching back to graphics mode will cause a crash). Enabling the external monitor while in video mode causes no side effects; you can then start X or switch to it if it's already running. The clcs(4) driver is somewhat flakey, so you're best off disabling it. It doesn't really matter though since the soundblaster (sb(4)) will attach and work fine. You may have to play with IRQ assignments to get that to work. Here is the XF86Config.Contact Angelos Keromytis. |
| IBM Thinkpad A21p | See the entry for the T21. Everything is the same except for the video card, which is an ATI Rage 128 Mobility LF. OpenBSD 2.8 works great with XFree86 4.0.2. You only have to enter the correct frequency ranges in the Monitor section of XF86Config. Here's a sample working XF86Config. |
| IBM Thinkpad A30p |
On my model, most things work fine with OpenBSD 3.1 and later. Beware that IBM does ship variations of the basic model, though. The usual setup as other Thinkpad models is required if one wishes to keep Windows around. As usual, multibooting Windows NT works. I have kept the restore partition around for now, and I recommend burning the recovery partition to CD, as a backup. The video card (ATI Radeon Mobility) needs to be told explicitly to run in 1600x1200 (which is just a two line addition to XF86Config). Sometimes, X doesn't start correctly, and needs to be killed and restarted. The XVideo extension works, so DVDs can be run full-screen with ogle. In -current, mplayer can display most other kinds of video as well. Sound works. The integrated Ethernet card works. The integrated Prism WiFi works. Suspend works. The special keys (sound volume, light intensity...) are handled by the hardware and work under OpenBSD as well. The CD Burner works. IDE dma is not recognized in 3.1, as the chipset is a new revision of the Intel 82801. This was fixed right after I got the laptop. I haven't even tried to get the modem or the infrared working. Contact Marc Espie. |
| IBM Thinkpad T21 |
As of OpenBSD 2.8, everything works fine. Here is the fdisk output; the easiest way of getting there is to resize the Windows partition (I use PartitionMagic) and move it to the end of the disk, then create an OpenBSD partition (and ignore the partition resizing fdisk does -- just go ahead and create all the filesystems you need with disklabel). Starting Ending #: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0: 1C 1023 1 1 - 1023 239 63 [ 42003423 - 20502657] <Unknown ID> *1: A6 0 1 1 - 1021 239 63 [ 63 - 15452577] OpenBSD 2: 00 0 0 1 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused 3: 00 0 0 1 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused To get it to see the serial and infrared ports (both as com* devices), you need to play with the IRQ assignments in the BIOS; just set them to the default values as found in the GENERIC config file. Likewise for the parallel port (OpenBSD can see lpt2). You may have to play with the Windows assignments for this as well. There's at least two miniPCI cards available at this point: one is an (unsupported) WinModem, and the other is a combo ethernet/modem card. The ethernet works just fine (detected as an fxp/inphy card); the modem looks like it's a real one, but it's not yet supported. Sound (CS4614) works fine. To avoid system freeze when using CardBus and audio simultaneously, you *may* need to set at least two IRQs for use by PCI devices, in the BIOS; I use 9 and 11. It is also necessary to turn off PCI Power Management in the BIOS Power configuration (that's the only menu that scrolls, so make sure you go to the bottom of the page :-) APM works except for hibernation (requires OS support). To get "halt -p" to work, you must set the sysctl variable machdep.apmhalt to 1 (you need OpenBSD 2.8-current with sources from mid-January, or later). You will need this line in your kernel configuration file for APM to work at all: option APM_DISABLE_INTERRUPTS=0 Although the video card is supposed to work with XFree86 3.3.6pl8, I've only managed to get it to work with XFree86 4.0.1 with patches (you can also find binaries of the driver for OpenBSD 2.8 at the same location). You need to have a kernel with "option INSECURE" and set the securelevel to -1 in /etc/rc.securelevel (so the X server can open /dev/mem and mmap() the BIOS). In this configuration, it can do 1400x1050 at 16bpp (version 1.1.13 of the savage driver works fine at 24bpp as well). UPDATE: The above-mentioned patches have been included in XFree86 4.0.2, and work out of the box. You don' need a kernel with the option INSECURE set, just set the machdep.allowaperture sysctl variable to 2, typically in /etc/sysctl.conf, if you have an OpenBSD 2.8 (or later) built from sources updated after December 15th 2000. Note that some models only do 1024x768. Those that do 1400x1050, can also do 1600x1200 using a virtual screen (wherein the whole display shifts as you go "off-screen"); I have not tested whether that works (it does in Windows). If you close the lid of the laptop, the system suspends; under XFree86 4.0, resuming works fine with respect to the display (XFree86 3.3.6 might not be able to cope with this -- it couldn't on the ThinkPad 770Z). Here is the XF86Config for XFree86 4.0. UPDATE Apparently, recent T21s have the ATI Rage 3D Rage Mobility instead. Here's an XF86Config for XFree86 4.0 for this configuration. One annoying thing is when you take out one of the UltraBay 2000 devices; the system starts beeping. The only way to make it stop is to suspend and then plug in a device in the UltraBay (not necessarily the same one). Note that hot-swap of UltraBay 2000 devices is not currently supported in OpenBSD (as of 2.8), thus it's only safe to hot-swap batteries. Contact Angelos Keromytis. |
| IBM Thinkpad 760 |
As of OpenBSD 2.6, XFree86 and APM do not work. Newer versions of XFree86 support X, and patches are available. MWave modem/sound does not work. APM has been fixed post-2.6 as well, and patches are forthcoming. Contact Todd Fries. |
| IBM Thinkpad T20 |
See http://www.snafu.org/t20/ for out-of-date info on this laptop. Contact Marco S Hyman. |
| IBM Thinkpad T23 model 26478NU. |
It's running OpenBSD -current. If using a boot floppy the system may hang when probing ahc. Workaround: boot with -c and disable ahc. A GENERIC kernel does not have this issue. Apm mostly works -- suspends OK, doesn't hibernate. The audio chipset is supported (auich). X works (XF4). Here is the XF86Config. See http://www.snafu.org/t23/ for more info. Contact Marco S Hyman. |
| IBM Thinkpad X31 |
Nearly all Hardware is supported, except FireWire and WinModem. APM is well supported. Suspend mode (apm -s/zzz) works without problems. Hibernation (suspend to disk) works also fine but requires a small MS-DOS partition with a hibernation file at the beginning of the harddisk. You can create this file with tphdisk from ports. (/usr/ports/sysutils/tphdisk) X.org works fine. Download an example config file. The two extra keys around the cursor block can be configured via xmodmap. Example: xmodmap -e "keycode 233 = Page_Down" xmodmap -e "keycode 234 = Page_Up" The integrated Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 in my X31 (Model 2672-C8G) works with the ipw(4) driver. But you need to download the unfree firmware first to get it working. For more details read man 4 ipw. I'm planning to replace this card with a ral(4) or an ath(4). For these cards, no unfree firmware required. To replace it, I'll have to unlock the bios first because IBM allows only special IBM wireless cards to be installed. The bios can be patched with the tpwireless program. (/usr/ports/misc/tpwireless, use on your own risk!) The integrated CF-Card reader (really nice!) is supported as well. Enhanced SpeedStep is supported. You can adjust the cpu speed via sysctl. (sysctl hw.setperf) The on-board fxp(4) and auich(4) are working without problems. The keys for mute, volume up and volume down are working fine. No special software is required. If you'd like to get the big "Access IBM" button to work and have a nice on-screen display, you can install tpb from ports. (/usr/ports/sysutils/tpb) This works just fine and you have nice on-screen messages when you change volume and brightness settings or enable/disable the ThinkLight. Download the dmesg. Contact Bernd Ahlers. |
| JVC MP-XP 7250DE |
Everything works fine except APM and the built-in SD card reader. Since OpenBSD 3.4 the boot loader does not boot correctly from USB CDROM on this machine -- workaround: take 3.3 and upgrade or boot via network or PCMCIA floppy. The audio chipset is supported. Wireless 802.11b PRISM 2.5 (USB) is supported, too. X (XF4) works fine. More infos (dmesg and XF86Config) can be found here. Contact Joerg Zinke. |
| Sony VAIO F430 |
As of OpenBSD 2.6-Current (Feb 17/00) APM: "zzz" suspend works, as does the keyboard suspend. "halt -p" and "apm -S" don't. (but I've yet to look for phdisk utilities below - will be investigating shortly.) DVD drive, floppy all function. Ethernet works after wakeup with the card I'm using (3Com 3c589). Contact Bob Beck. |
| Sony VAIO z505r |
APM support: "zzz", suspend via keyboard, hibernation
via keyboard, and "halt -p" all work.
"apm -S" wakes up immediately. Hibernation uses a block at the end of the disk, approximately 3-5MB larger than the memory in your machine. To repair hibernation, use "phdisk.exe /create /partition" to setup the partition. The phdisk program is available on the boot floppy image provided on the first recovery CD. Built-in ethernet works fine, but occasionally requires reset after suspend using "ifconfig fxp0 down; ifconfig fxp0 up". After a suspend, the profiling clock is not running. Patches are being worked on. Sound is supported using the neo(4) device driver. Sometimes upon boot, a hang happens when trying to determine the AC97 mixer type. When the memory stick slot is empty, it can cause errors which overflow the dmesg buffer, and thus confuse the OpenBSD install program. The BIOS Setup, (accessed using F2), has an option to disable the memory stick. You can find here a suitable XF86Config for XFree86 3.3.X. Contact Theo de Raadt. |
| Sony Vaio z505n: |
OpenBSD 3.6-current (as of August 2004) runs. Installation is cumbersome, though. The Sony CD drive does not boot the snapshot CD. Installation by USB floppy: The floppy36.fs of the snapshot (august 2004) can be brought to boot if one disables the following (boot -c, wait for the UKC> prompt): disable pcibios disable fxp disable pcicAfter this there is no USB, no PCMCIA, no Cardbus and no network. This means that the laptop has no input/output! So you have to put the install sets on a partition from some other OS or earlier installations of OpenBSD. The install script can mount ffs and msdos partitions. The kernel as supplied with the snapshot boots alright and recognizes all the relevant hardware (no firewire, no memorystick, no JogDial). Sound (yds) works. The XFConfig from the OpenBSD install works without modification. Contact Matthias Bauer. |
| Sony VAIO z505s |
Similar to the VAIO z505r, except that the provided USB floppy has
some problems. Contact Niels Provos. |
| Sony VAIO 747 |
Ever since OpenBSD 2.6, XFree86 and APM do work. Ships with a PCMCIA modem card (COM One MCC220 Platinum Card), which works. Sound works (8 bit only). APM behaviour similar to the VAIO z505r, except that hibernation has not been tested. USB does not work. Here is an XF86Config file. Contact Markus Friedl. |
| Sony VAIO PCG C1XD |
OpenBSD 3.6 works, but there are some minor issues:
Contact Alexander von Gernler. |
| Sony VAIO PCG-SRX77 |
OpenBSD 3.3 works but there are some quirks.
|
| Toshiba Libretto 50CT |
APM works but you need to be careful not to use the last
32meg or so of the disk since that's where the BIOS dumps
the long time hibernation image. You can take a look at
the bios geometry in disklabel to see exactly how many sectors
it wants. Failure to do so will cause filesystem corruption
during suspend.
The libretto uses a single IRQ for both sb(4) and wss so the best thing to do is to choose one and disable the other in the kernel. The pcmcia external floppy drive is not currently supported by OpenBSD, but it can be used during the install. Installation can be a bit tricky with only a single pcmcia slot. The best way to do this is to do a network install. To do this, load the boot floppy and at the boot prompt, enter boot -c. When you see the UKC prompt, unplug the floppy drive, plug in your network card, and then type exit. The kernel will then probe the network card and you should be able to do a normal network install. You may find it necessary to disable the sound devices in the BIOS in order for the boot floppy to correctly detect your network card. There are sample XF86Config files for both XFree86 4.X and XFree86 3.3.X. Note that the chips driver was broken in XFree86 4.1 (it is fixed in XFree86 4.2) and hence the XFree86 that ships with OpenBSD 3.0 does not work on the libretto. I have compiled the old XFree86 4.01 chips driver (which does work) for XFree86 4.1. Just grab chips_drv.o and copy it to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/chips_drv.oThat will make XFree86 4.1 work on the 50CT and 70CT. Contact Todd Miller. |
| Toshiba Libretto 100CT |
Most of the information listed in the Libretto 50CT entry
apply to the 100CT as well.
X11 works in 800x400 mode. There are sample XF86Config files for both XFree86 4.X and XFree86 3.3.X. Contact Todd Miller. |
| Toshiba Portege 2000 |
Builtin wavelan and 10/100 ethernet (fxp) work. Audio is not supported. APM works ("zzz"), as does "halt -p". However, battery life is reported incorrectly--it always reports that the laptop is connected to A/C power. USB attaches but is currently untested. The bundled pcmcia CD-ROM does not currently work. XFree86 4.2 and higher works. There is a sample XF86Config file. However, the keyboard repeat rate is a little too fast. |
| Toshiba Portege 660CDT |
APM is completely broken. The mixed sb(4) and wss(4) sound hardware can cause some grief. Newer versions of the flash BIOS are worse, since they are less flexible about what interrupts they allow. Contact Theo de Raadt. |
| Toshiba Satellite 2410S |
It's running OpenBSD 3.7-current. All stuff are working fine (graphics, sound, PCMCIA, APM, ethernet) except Infrared and SD card reader. There's a bug with certain toshiba laptops and XFree/X.org. Ratio is too quick, and some chars are repeated. To avoid that, disable X's kbd handling, and load a modmap with xmodmap. Here is the xorg.conf. and the dmesg. Contact Alexandre Anriot. |
| Toshiba Satellite 320CDS |
Trusty old model. Keep windows around, in at least a minimal
incarnation, as the BIOS setup is done in software, through a
X works fine in 800x600, 16 bits. The sound chip can be handled as a windows sound system clone (wss). This entails disabling the soundblaster clone recognition. The BIOS setup must also be set to separate channels for playing and recording. I haven't tried recording. PCMCIA cards work. Cardbus models work as well, provided the BIOS is set to cardbus mode, and not auto-detection. Contact Marc Espie. |
| Toshiba Tecra 500CS |
APM is broken, However it halt -p does work. Sound works by default with the GENERIC kernel, but with the speakers is not really worth it. X runs nicely as well. Contact Eric Jackson. |
| Toshiba Tecra 550CDT |
APM deep sleep (zzz) works, but -S wakes up
immediately. XFree86 works beautifully. Sound works, after some IRQ tinkering in the BIOS. USB works; at least, I plugged a digital camera in, and the ugen(4) driver detected and configured it. The pcic is broken in this machine, so I cannot accurately comment on PCMCIA attach/detach. Contact Aaron Campbell. |
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