On 2015-02-20 05:22 PM, Robert wrote:
After a quick check on lenovo.com, the Yoga 2 (10) seems to be interesting. Incl. LTE it's about 350 EUR. But I can't find any indications on the web that someone installed any alternative OS on it. I'm also not sure if it matters if you buy the Android or Windows version - the hardware seems to be the same.
I would buy the Windows version, at least you know that version is guaranteed to run Windows, and you could always run whatever you wanted (e.g. OpenBSD) inside VirtualBox if you were desperate. The Android versions are more likely to have custom IPL (pre-boot) environments instead of even UEFI - but that's a guess.
And the Bay Trail graphics are not supported yet: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=142106787528337 Ok... so let's wait. Maybe there will be some money this year to throw at an experiment ;)
Oh, if you want to spend ridiculous amounts of money, I guarantee Fujitsu will have *something* that both boots OpenBSD and meets your form-factor requirements, but it'll probably cost €1000+. Specifically, the Q704 and Q572 both might work. Fujitsu also has convertibles that are quite light & small now. I can't find anything that confirms whether they support legacy boot; again, the older and more corporate-oriented the device, the more likely it will. The newer and cheaper and more consumer-oriented the device, the less likely it'll be able to boot OpenBSD.
Btw, I guess that disk issue can be resolved by removing the disk and preparing it externally?
Good luck removing the disk. It might be soldered on DOM/flash in the Yoga line, not sure. The earlier the IdeaPad series did not have field-replaceable storage, the entire motherboard had to be replaced. More likely you'd boot an EFI-compliant OS (e.g. Ubuntu Linux) from USB and use dd(1). First, to backup the existing contents byte-for-byte, second to erase the internal disk (zapping all GPT structures) and third to copy over a pre-prepared image, like install56.fs which can overwrite itself. And even then there's no guarantee... of course, zero'ing out the hard disk would probably make returning it to the shop easy: "it won't boot" ;-).
Unless you've found handwriting recognition or on-screen-keyboards that work well with OpenBSD, you'll probably still have to carry around a USB keyboard, which might make the whole exercise pointless. Good luck, anyway.
-- -Adam Thompson [email protected]
