On the Metal

In this article I'm going to run through installing NetBSD and the xfce4 desktop (Figure 1) on an old, repurposed laptop. The sacrificial machine for me was a ThinkPad T450, which I picked up refurbished on Amazon for £140 (~$180). This model came out in 2015. Older ThinkPads are generally a good choice for BSD compatibility. Additionally, a refurbished ThinkPad will be an order of magnitude more performant than a typical entry-level netbook, which pretty much becomes e-waste the moment it leaves the factory. The T450 I bought came with an Intel Core i5-5300U 2.3GHz CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SATA hard drive.

It's hoped that once this tutorial has got you up and running with NetBSD, you can Google your way to the freedom-respecting OS of your dreams. I haven't covered everything a desktop user might desire (for example, you will need to research codecs if you want to play back YouTube videos at any reasonable framerate) – but you will have in your hands a really capable bare-bones system.

Your first stop is www.netbsd.org to download a memory stick image; the file you're looking for is called NetBSD-10.0-amd64-install.img.gz (the latest release at the time of writing, from March 28, 2024). Download and save it to your computer, then unzip it with:

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