Question about hardware support

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2011, Matthias Apitz wrote:

> El día Wednesday, December 07, 2011 a las 12:54:35PM +0000, Matthew Seaman escribió:
>
>> Drivers in FreeBSD are generally described in terms of the specific
>> components (motherboard chipset, NIC, SATA controller, etc. etc.) rather
>> than in terms of a specific whole machine produced by a manufacturer.
>>
>> Laptops are particularly tricky in this regard, and if no-one else has
>> reported on your particular model, generally the best procedure is to
>> try booting the device using a USB or CD-Rom image, and see what does
>> and doesn't work.
>
> One good method is to let it boot a recent Knoppix DVD and see what chips it
> 'sees'; it will not touch the installed OS;

Along those lines, PC-BSD (pcbsd.org) has a live DVD or live USB mode.