installing bsd on a laptop

[Joe Altman]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 04:54:09AM -0600, Andrew L. Gould wrote:
> On Monday 20 December 2004 12:53 am, NathanKelly31 at aol.com wrote:
> > hello, do you know of any laptop brands that can run freebsd or
> > openbsd that is available to purchase???
> 
> I was unable to get a Compaq's pccard working under FreeBSD 5.2.1 using 
> either the new or old pccard systems.  I had no problems on a Dell 
> using FreeBSD 4.10 or 5.3.

Not following up to Andrew, in particular, but to point out the "...a
Dell (or Gateway or HP or whatever)..." is not very exact; and it may
be helpful to indicate a model and /or number for any recommendation.

For instance: 

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/notebooks?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

shows several possible notebooks. Let's take this one:

Inspiron 1150, with various features, including:

Memory 256MB Shared DDR SDRAM, 1 Dimm which means that video fills its
needs from system memory. Now, the issue here is that for lower
end laptops that use shared memory and the Intel integrated graphics
chip with a bios lock on memory allocation, you may end up w/o the
ability to display in 1024x768 in X.

So it may pay for anyone to check to see that the available memory is
sufficient to provide a minimum comfortable resolution.

Another example:

http://products.gateway.com/products/GConfig/prodDetails.asp?system_id=m275x&seg=hm

Midway down, you'll see this:

Integrated Intel. Extreme Graphics 2

What does that mean, WRT resolution in X? I can't find out, easily
(it's a JavaScript thing). It is likely that it has enough memory for
1024x768 or even a finer resolution; but it would be a good idea to
make sure, IMO. In short, I would recommend that you get as much
detail from the vendor as you can; and don't assume that because it is
a modern machine and some models in a brand do work very well with
FreeBSD that any given model will work well with FreeBSD.