T40p - good choice for running FBSD?

[Peter Schuller]

Hello,

> I've look at a new laptop and the IBM T40p looks like nice.
> After searching in this list, many employees favorite the IBM brand.
> Is there any reason why I don't buy a T40p(any experience aside from
> Lukas Ertl's laptop list)?
> It looks like the same as T40. How contented the T40p owner?

The p has a higher resolution IIRC; sligtly higher cpu frequency and built-in 
bluetooth by default. Also a different wireless chipset IIRC, but not sure.

As for buying or not... there are a few rough edges but overall I'm quite 
happy with FreeBSD 5 on my T40p. I have put some notes up here that you might 
find worth reading:

http://www.scode.org/freebsdt40p.html

Short summary of things that dont quite work (though I may be forgetting 
something):

* Having an extra battery in the "ultra bay" (or something; don't remember 
what they call it) results in hangs during shutdown and just about any kind 
of ACPI event coming from the hardware (swithing keyboard LEDs on/off etc). 
This was on CURRENT a while back though; it may be fixed by now.

* Suspend/resume never did work right for me with ACPI, though its working now 
with APM given that (1) you're not in X (though X may be running on another 
VC) and (2) a patched em0 driver to prevent it from breaking after a resume. 
Sometimes you can get hangs on resume, but I think it has something to do 
with disc activity. Running with APM turned on, but apmd turned *off*, I 
don't have a problem in practice.

* Bluetooth was wokring fine for me up until recently. Not sure where the 
problem lies though, so it may still be working and its just a configuration 
issue. I haven't had time to look at it in a while.

Otherwise I think things are working fine. No problems with the wireless card 
(assuming 5.1+ CURRENT or 5.2 since the atheros driver is very new), cd 
burner works fine, X works fine (though no AGP)...

-- 
/ Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB

PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller <peter.schuller at infidyne.com>'
Key retrieval: Send an E-Mail to getpgpkey at scode.org
E-Mail: peter.schuller at infidyne.com Web: http://www.scode.org