Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:39:50 -0400 From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@telenix.org> To: Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble@gmail.com> Cc: Razmig K <strontium90@gmail.com>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Laptop suggestions? Message-ID: <488A4826.7040509@telenix.org> In-Reply-To: <5f67a8c40807251307q5eac959an48de528ab89d663d@mail.gmail.com> References: <20080725120020.A428F106569E@hub.freebsd.org> <488A0EF0.6020402@gmail.com> <5f67a8c40807251307q5eac959an48de528ab89d663d@mail.gmail.com>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote: > On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Razmig K <strontium90@gmail.com> wrote: > >> How about Dell models which come with Ubuntu preinstalled? (Inspiron 1525N >> and 1420N, XPS M1330). Don't they have higher chances of running FreeBSD >> smoothly? A quick glance over the hardware notes of 7.0-RELEASE and some >> googling around show that wireless, video and audio are supported. >> > > One problem with most of the Dell offerings is that they use the NVidia > video chipset. Now this is a plus if you're into playing a few games, but > it sucks if you're running FreeBSD. There is a problem is you're running the AMD64 chipsets, but I'm running a quad core processor here, and my Nvidia card (8600GTS) with it's compiled Nvidia driver works just fine. One of the original requests was for >> 4G RAM. The NVidia binary driver only works on IA32, not AMD64 (and the > opensource driver sucks at even 2D), so your RAM is practically limited to > around 3.5G (depending on a few things). I also havn't seen very many > laptops advertising >4G yet (4G, but not more than 4G). > > Personally, I have the XPS-1730. Largely I tolerate the slow binary driver > for AMD64. I use IA32 when I need wine, but my use of ZFS (the 1730 has an > option for 2 hard drives) seems to eat up kernel memory until wine can't > start pretty quickly. The opensource driver does work and supports nice > things like DPMS ---- it's just that the 2D acceleration feels very lacking > and it also can't do things like scale a movie at full frame rate. This > means that I tend to reboot into windoze for entertainment ... since I can't > generally use IA32 mode productively anyways. > > Other than the video and the fact that I've never seen a Dell suspend > successfully under FreeBSD, The laptop is well supported. The PCI express > slots and their contents (USB or PCI) show up fine. Even the EVDO broadband > modem is fairly easy to suppport. I think the only feature without any > support is the SD card reader. > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkiKSCYACgkQz62J6PPcoOmb/ACdGHfxU4Rpt9k9UaYYc6X2UpFD TQkAnA0hlM1UwzDJMUpAe72zJIGQ0vBN =95ZS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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