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Theo de Raadt writes a fascinating story from the s2k15 hackathon in Brisbane about the reasons that the mice and keyboards were problematic on the new ThinkPad X1, specifically, having keyboard repeat and shutter during install, eventually being figured out to happen due to the large and extra sensitive touchpad. It all came down to the pms driver, or lack thereof, as it's missing only on the RAMDISK kernels used on the install media, and they were the only ones being visibly affected.
"The solution is to forcibly reset the mouse port at attach," de Raadt proclaims. Some other keyboard issues, notably boot -c not working on some machines, were also determined to be caused by the mouse ports, too.
But the changes are risky, and require lots of testing prior to commit, due to the plethora of keyboard controller models, so, it didn't make the cut for the upcoming 5.7 release.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @02:55AM
Sounds like a recipe for endless problems and missing functionality.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by engblom on Friday March 13 2015, @06:15AM
I have been many years running OpenBSD on a laptop. I can not understand why you got moderated insightful for your comment. Have you actually tried OpenBSD on a laptop?
OpenBSD has everything you expect for desktop/laptop usage with exception of flash-plugin and Skype because both of them are closed source. It has good drivers for WiFi, ACPI, all common programs (Firefox, Chromium, Libreoffice, Xfce, Gnome etc).
What do you consider to be missing and what do you consider to be a problem?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 13 2015, @06:50AM
If you've use it for Many Years on the same laptop, I can assure you it started out as a compromise (people forget the pain of the past), and got better over time.
There are STILL things that don't work on older laptops, and other things that won't work on newer laptops.
I use it every day on a laptop, just as an auxiliary screen.
I'll be ordering CDs and moving my main firewall to a new box with OpenBSD. Maybe my mail server too.
I have enough iron in that new box to run a virtual machine as well, but I haven't found any thing that will allow me to use OpenBSD as a host for a virtual machine.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by jb on Friday March 13 2015, @07:14AM
Perhaps not on commodity platforms, but if you can get your hands on some T-series sparc64 gear, OpenBSD's ldomd(8) has worked well since 5.5.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 13 2015, @10:03PM
Fail to see how that is germane to running a virtual machine inside a Openbsd Host.
Theo de Raadt has a serious attitude against hypervisors and virtual machines.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by novak on Friday March 13 2015, @06:36AM
Some people care more about well engineered, secure software than touchscreen drivers and 3D graphical window animations.
Yeah, they don't have the biggest software team, nor the most drivers. They still build high quality software.
novak
(Score: 2) by joekiser on Friday March 13 2015, @04:53PM
Using a relatively recent Thinkpad with OpenBSD has historically been an overwhelmingly pleasant experience. The only thing missing is a tool or system call that prolongs battery life on AC (example: once discharged to 40%, the battery automatically starts charging to 80% again before starting its discharge cycle). This software is available on Linux and under Lenovo's ThinkVantage suite for Windows. I went through a 6-cell on my X201/X200s Frankenpad in about 8 months under OpenBSD, when it would have lasted several years on other platforms.
XFCE, LibreOffice, Firefox, VLC, etc. are all kept up to date and hardware support is at least as good as Windows. I have no experience using other laptops with OpenBSD.
Debt is the currency of slaves.