free bsd on laptops

[Thomas Donnelly]

Kevin Oberman wrote:
>> Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2010 17:29:05 +0530
>> From: Mubeesh ali <mubeeshalivm at gmail.com>
>> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
>>
>> Hi ,
>>
>> Thanks david for your  detailed reply.
>>
>> I hope these would work in a bsd laptop:
>>
>>
>> ATI or NVIDIA graphics card
>>     
> ATI is open source friendly. NVIDIA is not. Still, both generally work.
>   
I must be missing something because to my knowledge FreeBSD does not 
have any 3D support for any modern ATi card while nVidia has 32 and 64 
bit drivers that work very well for full 3D acceleration (needed for 
things like compiz). I am running 8-Stable amd64 with a GTX 260 in my 
desktop at work and it runs very fast. I would extremely highly 
recommend nVidia over ATi if you are going to be using FreeBSD. My 
Inspiron XPS has an ATi Mobility Radeon 9800 and not only does it not 
have 3D support, it also frequently hard locks when running the ATi 
driver. This laptop works fine with any other OS.

 Also, Intel Integrated works well and is a decent choice if you don't 
need lots of horsepower.
>   
>> hibernate or suspend functionality
>>     
> Very platform and BIOS sensitive. It is hit and miss.
>
>   
>> touchpad
>>     
> Never seen much of  problem. Full "Synaptics" support. Just works.
>
>   
>> built in wireless card  mostly  Intel dot11 N wireless cards
>> datacard ;make qualcomm (bsnl evdo mmx 300 )
>>     
The best laptop I have seen for support is the one from iXSystems, which 
is designed for FreeBSD and comes pre installed with PC-BSD.

http://www.ixsystems.com/ix/services/home-and-office/ix-invincibook

Otherwise I would look into the Dell Precision Series laptops or the 
older XPS's that have nVidia cards (XPS M1330, 1530, 1710, etc)

-=Tom