After I drove back to Wyoming from New Mexico, I decided to engage myself in the Thinkpad x201 project. I had most of the parts anyway (indeed, all I am currently missing is a new eraser-tip style pointer and my _Powered by FreeBSD_ sticker).
I replaced the screen, well actually the entire top of the laptop. I found the assembly for cheap on eBay. So, many screws and some wire routing... voila! I also removed the regular 2.5" hard drive and replaced it with a 500GB SATA SSD. Before complete reassembly, I gave exerything a thorough cleaning.
Then I went ahead and installed the OS. FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p4 amd64. Ran portsnap fetch and installed my normal complement of software. I have decided to go with i3 on this laptop for now. I had dotfiles saved from a while back that made it a breeze to setup. At the moment, I am using plain vanilla i3. I am pretty "meh" on taking the time to compile gaps for right now.
All is perfect. Except one thing: no sound from the speakers, but I do have sound from the headphone jack. This is not too terrible as I have a nice pair of flat response studio monitor over ear headphones. It does bug me that I have this issue. I have screwed with mixer and aumix to no avail -- I thought it was a simple case of not having the volume raised on the speaker device... nope.
