Laptops & FreeBSD⌗

LeftWM_Image

Today I’m going to give you a run down on configuring FreeBSD for a thinkpad T440p. It’s a old machine at this point, but I just can’t bring myself to stop using it; and it just won’t die despite my best attempts some of which I’ve listed.

  • water cooling it with cobbled together parts and soldered copper tubing
  • liquid metal air cooled
  • running it as a server with dozen’s of virtual machines.
  • lots of other things it was never designed for. :)

The hardware⌗

Model: Thinkpad T440p

  • cpu: i7-4800mq
  • ram: 16GB ddr3 1600mhz
  • ssd1: SK Hynix Gold 500GB
  • ssd2: Adata white label
  • display: 1920x1080p matte ips
  • pointing device: t450 trackpad

The Install⌗

The install process for FreeBSD itself is a rather boring affair; in the best way possible. It just works.

It’s been awhile since the new FreeBSD installer was designed and it’s fairly easy to navigate even for new users.

  1. plug in usb drive
  2. select the usb as the boot device.
  3. follow the install prompts
  4. boot into the system and remove the usb
  5. install the X11 server
  6. install i3-lock-fancy package.
  7. install leftwm

LeftWM⌗

LeftWM itself is a windows manager written in rust that you can configure with either toml or ron files.

The toml configuration files are the original way to handle the leftwm config but are now being replaced with the ron style. The conf I’m using is still the older style because it’s the same syntax as the rust languages configs which I find convenient.

Memory Usage⌗

This is one of the main reasons I love using the leftwm windows manager. I can open up six or so virtual desktops, navigate through them like butter and it will take up virtually no system resources.

as of this moment the individual processes that make up my desktop environment are less than 70MB of memory.

  1. leftwm 3.1MB
  2. leftwm-worker 9.1MB
  3. polybar 28MB
  4. SSDM 20MB

You might have noticed that the free memory on in the image above seems very low. This is by design; memory when using FreeBSD with ZFS is filled to work as a cache for your ZFS dataset. Often you will see the phrase:

“unused memory is wasted memory”

Configuration⌗

If you are running a Unix system that is a valid rust target and want to try it out you can grab a copy of my configuration from my git server here –> https://gorge.works/git