# Lenovo T430



## 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX (Jun 17, 2018)

Greetings to all.

 I have developed an unhealthy fascination with BSD, lately, and I have a refurbished T430 on the way that I want to put FreeBSD on. Are there any known issues with the T430 that I should be aware of, prior to installation? Hopefully, since this is an older model, and one that has a healthy following, I would assume that it would be fairly plug-and-play, but I wanted to go into this educated. I really appreciate any help that the community can give me.


----------



## Deleted member 48958 (Jun 17, 2018)

Hello! On T420 FreeBSD works pretty well, so probably it should also work OK
on T430 as well. If you'll use intel integrated graphics, you should be able to suspend to RAM,
to suspend to RAM when lid will be closed, add "hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3" to /etc/sysctl.conf,
then restart sysctl with `# service sysctl restart`.


----------



## Minbari (Jun 17, 2018)

T430 owner here! All are working OK, except the Fn keys which rely on the old acpi_ibm (acpi who was developed for the T43, I think, not sure) but with some tweaks (xbindkeys) the problem can be solved.


----------



## 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX (Jun 17, 2018)

Thanks for the answers. I'm _brand_ _new_ to BSD, and a lot of the terminology seems overwhelming, but I'm more curious than intimidated, and I've been known to bite off more than I can chew, anyway. No idea why I'm so drawn to BSD, but I'm starting to swim with the current on the urge...


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 17, 2018)

Here is the ThinkWiki page for your T430, i have a T400.

The only possible stumbling block I see is that your box might use the NVIDIA NVS 5400M Graphics with Optimus Technology chip, as Optimus doesn't always play nice with FreeBSD. I have a W520 with Optimus I run OpenBSD on.

My T400 has "Switichable Graphics", which must be the second cousin on the fathers side of Optimus, as I had to set it to Discreet Graphics in the BIOS to get it to select 1 of the 2 cards onboard to work right.

And that may be what you have to do if yours uses Optimus.



1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX said:


> Thanks for the answers. I'm _brand_ _new_ to BSD, and a lot of the terminology seems overwhelming, but I'm more curious than intimidated, and I've been known to bite off more than I can chew, anyway. No idea why I'm so drawn to BSD, but I'm starting to swim with the current on the urge...




This may help:

Beginners Guide - How To Set Up A FreeBSD Desktop From Scratch


----------



## 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX (Jun 18, 2018)

Great write-up. Thank you.

If I run the system off of a live usb, any possible issues should appear at that time, correct? 

...as a side note: is it possible to create a FreeBSD usb with persistence? I would love to test drive a few different versions before committing.


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 18, 2018)

1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX said:


> If I run the system off of a live usb, any possible issues should appear at that time, correct?
> 
> ...as a side note: is it possible to create a FreeBSD usb with persistence? I would love to test drive a few different versions before committing.



I think you're getting BSD and Linux a little mixed up. There is FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and some versions of FreeBSD that feature Hardening or a desktop already set up, but "different versions" makes me think you're referring to distros. 

I know you can run Linux in persistence with Kali but unless it's the new NomadBSD recently posted about I think you're limited in that area with BSD, though I could be mistaken.


----------



## 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX (Jun 18, 2018)

I was thinking that FreeBSD could be run from a live usb, without installing. If I'm incorrect about that, my apologies. I installed GhostBSD on a usb and ran it that way, quite successfully, but noticed that there wasn't an option for persistence. I also stopped by OSDisc.com to see if they offered a BSD variant with persistence, but didn't see any. I was under the impression that BSD (and it's variants) are UNIX-based in the same way that GNU/Linux is. I've lost track of the number of GNU/Linux distros that I've copied onto a usb via the Universal USB Installer program. Most of those live usb's created that way are limited to 4GB of persistence, but I have found that is usually more that enough space to customize the desktop environment and kick the tires a bit before committing to it. I assumed, maybe incorrectly, that there must be a similar process for FreeBSD, etc. If it were possible, I could find out precisely what I was interested in, and see if there were any issues before installing it onto my new (used) laptop. Is the live usb a good index of hardware and software playing nice with each other?


----------



## 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX (Jun 18, 2018)

I think I found it:






https://www.aioboot.com/en/freebsd/


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 18, 2018)

1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX said:


> If it were possible, I could find out precisely what I was interested in, and see if there were any issues before installing it onto my new (used) laptop. Is the live usb a good index of hardware and software playing nice with each other?



I really wouldn't worry too much about hardware compatibility with your T430.

I have 4 Thinkpads running FreeBSD ATM, and while none of them are a T430 there are other people using them better able help you with any particular problems you might possibly encounter. Thinkpads are very popular in the FreeBSD community.

I don't personally recommend using a variant with a desktop already set up and prefer to build my own, but TrueOS and GhostBSD come to mind.


----------



## mrclksr (Jun 18, 2018)

1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX said:


> I was thinking that FreeBSD could be run from a live usb, without installing.



Hi 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX,

check out NomadBSD. With version 1.1-RC1 you can even install packages.


----------



## 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX (Jun 19, 2018)

mrclksr said:


> Hi 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX,
> 
> check out NomadBSD. With version 1.1-RC1 you can even install packages.



This looks _really_ cool. I'll have to make a live usb with it. Thank you.


----------



## 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX (Jul 24, 2018)

mrclksr said:


> Hi 1-800-It's-NOT-UNIX,
> check out NomadBSD. With version 1.1-RC1 you can even install packages.


----------

