I'm finally back to using the ThinkPad x40 for general use and testing purposes. This is a machine I bought some years back because it was the one most of the OpenBSD developers had been providing a great deal of support for. It has been a fantastic little machine in a number of respects. It has a great keyboard for long work hours (although, if left plugged in and compiling software through the ports, it sometimes gets a bit warm) and the battery lasts forever. I use the extended battery (which I have been chastised for, as it somewhat defeats the light weight and small size of the machine without the extended battery) and have been able to go more than six hours without plugging in.
There are plenty of issues I have running OpenBSD in comparison with OS X on my MacBook Pro. I won't be leaving the MacBook any time soon, as I depend heavily upon programs like Photoshop, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, .Mac, integration with my iPhone and Blackberry, Aperture, Final Cut, etc. I just can't see how to make some of the relatively easy multimedia stuff work the way I want on OpenBSD. It just isn't worth the time for me. Yet. I imagine there will come a day when the locked-in-I-got-you-by-the-nads nature of software licensing will irk me enough to work to make other applications work. It is frustrating, however, because what are seemingly simple issues - like connectivity to PDAs - aren't. That is, the developers of hardware such as PDAs do not necessarily follow any type of standards and when you want to connect for syncing data, a lot of hacking has to happen to make it work. I don't even want to get into the multimedia - like HD video and RAW photos - side of things. So, on one hand, you sell your soul to the guy who requires you sign an EULA that is ridiculous and completely incomprehensible or, you get what you can be assured is *free* to use as you please, but is limited in areas where you want to manipulate data. A prime example, besides the multimedia content, remains business and Microsoft Word or Excel. There are so many documents we will receive from customers that have some type of proprietary (proprietary to Microsoft, that is) formatting, the it make using OpenOffice (which isn't all that open) or some type of BSD style licensed replacement not all that viable. This is simply a reality of doing business and it is not realistic for me to refuse documents that don't follow a certain format when the end user sending them to me has no clue what they are doing.
Right now, the only problem I'm running into is that the package snapshots have not caught up yet to the system snapshot I'm using and I'm stuck building a lot of applications from the ports. I am going to take the dive and experiment a bit with gimp and see how it fares with some of my photo stuff. As far as music goes, I'm less attached to iTunes than I was before. I stopped buying DRMed songs and rely more on our Sonos system at home than carrying around a lot of you-are-locked-into-iTunes music. (It turns out that purchasing used CDs through djangos.com is actually cheaper than buying an inferiorly encoded mp3 or aac track from a CD. In other words, I rip the way I please and depending upon the music itself, sometimes a higher bitrate doesn't make sense.)
If curious or interested, I've update the dmesg output and my xorg.conf file here (dmesg) and here (xorg.conf). I haven't been able to get flash on YouTube or other sites that require it to work properly, but until I get gaim and konquerer installed, I won't put much time into that.
One note for the archives: if you want Opera to work properly, you must set 'sysctl kern.emul.linux=1', otherwise, Opera will give out an obscure 'cannot run' error. I know I had this problem last time I ran Opera on the x40, but I never made any note of it, so I couldn't remember what the solution is.
