desktop dominance

[Jim Stapleton]

> I have had Linux for a long time. I have a different desktop coming
> that I am eager to play with FreeBSD on. It is a dual processored
> Intel Xeon @ 3.2ghz (64-bit). How are HP workstations with FreeBSD?


As already said by another user, most things won't be too bad, but
vendors use a lot of different hardware. The things I'd recommend.

1) Read the handbook, like every other piece of documentation, it's
not all-encompasing, but it's one of the best I've seen.
2) In my experience, you are most likely to run into "interesting
quirks" with sound, pcmcia/pccard, and USB/Firewire, in that order.
I've not used raid. Most other things seem to work fairly well
out-of-the-box. These all may take some set up and manual install.

In the release notes, you can find hardware compatibility information,
but it does not seem to be all inclusive - it's more of a "if it's
here, it will/wont work as described, if it's not, your mileage may
vary". I would take whatever OS it comes installed with, and get the
chipset information on the following out of the driver/device
configurations, if you don't know initially, or can't get them
elsewhere:


1) Video
2) Sound
3) Network
4) USB controller
5) SCSI/ATA/RAID controllers (unlikely to cause issues in my
experience, but certainly not unheard of)
6) North/South bridge (unlikely to cause issue, but better safe than sorry)