Better laptop support in 6.0?

[Peter Clutton]

On 11/11/05, Paul Waring <paul at xk7.net> wrote:
> A while back I spent a lot of time trying to get FreeBSD 5.3 working on
> my Toshiba Satellite Pro M10 laptop with no success. I was wondering if
> version 6 adds anything that would be more likely to make it possible to
> install FreeBSD on my laptop? I currently use it on a server system with
> no problems and it would be nice to have it on another system as well.
> I've found the hardware support for desktop machines to be good, but
> when it comes to laptops it seems to be a pain to get even the CDs to
> boot sometimes - though NetBSD and various Linux distributions work.

I can't comment on your previous problems, as I've got FreeBSD 5.4
running on a state of the art Sony vaio laptop, I use it for
everything. Not sure what could be causing the CDs not to work,
without error messages, but by that description it may not have been
OS related.

However FreeBSD 6 being the latest release, it does offer better
hardware support for the latest devices, with obviously more and more
drivers added with each release. One of the focuses was on Wireless
support aswell, if you had any trouble with that.

All in all, giving FreebSD 6 a go on the laptop would probably be a
very good idea, and your chances would definitely be improved, but
there's no guarantee. If you have any problems with it, this is the
list to post them to. Good Luck!