Last week my Thinkpad T40 took a coffee shower and went to the repair shop. I picked up this old notebook and installed FreeBSD 5.2.1. I set up X terminal and borrow my colleague's computer for daily work. It's not long term solution but it works, before I can get my notebook back:)
The only tricky problem is how to make my old "IBM Credit Card Ethernet II" work.
I made a kernel with /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/OLDCARD,
this way I can get the card recognized. And I wrote /etc/pccard.conf to resolve irq conflict:
irq 9 3
Here you can download my kernel config file and my XF86Config.
In my kernel config file VESA and SC_PIXEL_MODE options are turned up, thus you can run
vidcontrol -g 100x37 VESA_800x600 to enter 100x37 console. Better add it as allscreens_flags option to rc.conf.