Experience in FreeBSD -- Setup (Post-Installation) on ThinkPad T530 and Daily Usage
On ThinkPad T530 which configured with NVIDIA Optimus, it is necessary to set the right configurations in BIOS.
Post-installation of FreeBSD is time consuming. Especially, there is no single reference guide that walk the FreeBSD user to accomplish this task. When it comes to T530 ThinkPad machine things become even harder. In this repository I am summing up all of my experience and sharing it with you. I hope in one source you will be able to have your FreeBSD on you machine ready for daily work.
To save your time and be able to logon a FreeBSD onto a Xfce4/KDE session on ThinkPad T530 with graphics driven by NVIDIA card
This experience will let you configure your T530 machine after installation of FreeBSD in 3 folds
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System The two most important configuration files are
/boot/loader.confand/etc/rc.conf. In directory sc, you will find a working copy of those two files with comments to show the purpose of some entries. In addition, all the necessary configurations that I needed around the two mentioned files are also copied with files including the target path on your system separated by underscore_. -
X Server To setup X Server to utilise Nvidia as the Discrete Graphics provider the configurations are provided in discrete-graphics. A copy of
/etc/X11/xorg.confis provided for your reference. -
Video Drivers The steps to install and configure video drivers in video-drivers
Release 11.1 is originally installed and then the system is upgraded to release 11.2. The EoL of release 11.2 is 11.3-Release + 3 months as published on FreeBSD Security Information.
Check Update & Upgrade Steps to see how it is upgraded to release 11.2.
The system is upgraded to Release 12.0. The upgrade was not straight. It required a couple of cycles of update-related commands.
The subject machine has the following specifications
hw.machine: amd64
hw.model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz
(2394.62-MHz K8-class CPU)
hw.ncpu: 8
The subject ThinkPad T530 is built with GF108 / NVS 5400 NVIDIA Card. This is known on web as NVIDIA Optimus. In fact, the following configurations set is not only required in BSD but Arch Linux, Slackware, and Fedora, too. I have not tried with Ubuntu.
Check
cpu_info, for more details on the subject machine specifications
FreeBSD Installation is successful and the root password is set and it is online.
- Graphics Device: Discrete Graphics
- OS Detection for NVIDIA Optimus: Disabled
In order to setup the correct firmware of the installed Network Interface (device) the following steps are provided.