Best older model laptop for FreeBSD 5.x

[Andrew L. Gould]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 03:44:00PM -0700, 3BSD wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm thinking about buying an older model laptop to put FreeBSD 5.x on.
> I had an IBM Thinkpad T21 and FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE ran fine, but the
> XFree86 drivers were less than stable, and so was the ACPI support,
> sound support was also very dodgy. Now I have the urge to put FreeBSD
> on a laptop again. I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a P2/P3
> laptop from a company like IBM, or even Dell, that has almost no
> problems running FreeBSD. I don't really care too much about good
> sound, but I do care about stable X drivers and all the rest.
> 
> MTIA
> 
> -3BSD

I had good luck on a Dell Inspiron 8100. (I'm playing with SUSE Linux 9.1 on it as the moment.)  FreeBSD 5.2.1 with ACPI installed without problems.  The ltmdm port seems to identify the modem, although I haven't tried to use it. My laptop uses an nVidia chip, so you have a choice of XFree86 or nVidia video drivers; although I've heard there are models with an ATI video chip.

You can find lots of FreeBSD laptop information at:

http://www.zapatec.com/freebsd/laptop/

Best of luck,

Andrew Gould