Back on OpenBSD
After juggling around hardware this past month and organizing all of my backed up data on my NAS, I was able to get the old ThinkPad P51 back on OpenBSD.
The Ubuntu setup on my T470 is working very well, better than Windows with all of my hardware accessories. I can dock it with the work provided dock from my work laptop to use my 34-inch Ultra-wide Curved monitor, Logitech wireless keyboard, MX Master 3 mouse and Microsoft Teams USB headset. It is a nice workstation setup with a stand-up desk. All the laptop features work nicely including the keyboard function shortcuts. It's boring but reliable.
I don't have any data or much software installed on the T470. I don't have interest in snap or flatpaks or whatever is used. I'm using the Synology DS220j NAS for everything, as much as it can do. The NAS is very entry level but it does the job even after 5 years. Now that I have a reliable workstation and process for my data storage, it was time to rebuild the OpenBSD tester.
I don't know what I was doing but the OpenBSD install wasn't working. I tried it on an older Acer C720 Chromebook that has coreboot bios installed and always worked with every Linux distro but not OpenBSD. It would never boot up.
I tried it on the P51 again because I knew it worked before but not this time. It wouldn't boot either. I thought it must be the flash drive or a bad download. I tried FreeBSD but that wouldn't finish the install and ran into issues with the installed SSD. From here, I thought might as well try out Arch Linux again. It installed fine from the flash drive, I played around with i3 and Awesome and Alacritty. Now I knew it wasn't the flash drive or the computer, but it must be during the install I'm messing up.
I tried OpenBSD again this morning and chose only the defaults and it worked! Finally a working BSD tester. I believe I was doubting myself last night and selecting other options that I thought would be correct. The lesson here is just choose the defaults as the OpenBSD website instructions state to do.