Just a quick entry to check I can post okay from my tablet. Maybe more beneficial. From my phone so I can upload photos. Nice and easy to do from the official WordPress app, just needed to enter the url of my self-hosted domain and user\password combo
Things to do in lockdown – rebuild world!
Well, FreeBSD world. time had come to update to 12.1 release and thankfully its been much easier than the jump from 11.x to 12.0 Merge did not throw up any issues and 12.1 base built itself overnight ready for installing yesterday morning.
Only pain has been trying to stop python2 getting installed with re-installing all the ports. I think I am just going to have to accept until everything is rebuilt and then remove it. Default versions have been defined in make.conf but seems some ports ignore.
Biggest challenge I was running the Kmod-legacy-drm drivers in the belief these were correct. Several reboots and reinstalls and tinkering did not resolve the unreadable display at boot time meant I had to SSH in from elsewhere to work on it. The cure in the end was quite simple, install the current kmod driver port and voila hi-res text and graphics have been restored. Only issue now is that the Mate Desktop menu’s have disappeared to I can’t actually quit the desktop. but least I can work the box directly now.
EDIT: reinstall of Mate notifications and menu ports has restored my menus.
Old School BIOS Update – via CD-ROM
Planning for the next major FreeBSD update, I decided I should update the old BIOS first, Lenovo are very good at releasing updates to BIOS/UEFI long after the product has ceased being available.
Suffice to say a quick check of https://pcsupport.leveno.com/gb/en and pumping in the Model No (or device serial no) detailed a list of updates for my hardware a good 5 years newer than the original BIOS that shipped with this box.
However is its non-Windows all the usual update tools where irrelevant. Litterally had to dust down my DVD/CD recordable drive and download the BIOS ISO and burn to CD. A quick dabble to change the boot order and re-enable the original DVD drive and I was finally able to flash the BIOS. All very slow compared to in-windows updates on my other devices.
No major great improvements, but better support for any more modern hardware I might chuck inside like SSD’s in the future.