Sony TR2A and FreeBSD -- any comments?

[Bill Paul]

I currently own a Sony PCG-C1VP Picturebook laptop which has served me
well for about two years now (in spite of its disk dying on me recently).
I'm contemplating upgrading it to a Sony TR2A, but I'd prefer not to plunk
down the money on it only to encounter unexpected problems trying to get
FreeBSD running on it. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who has one
of these things, and I can't easily experiment on the demo models in
the local computer stores, so I'm hoping someone here has some experience
with one of these and can answer some questions.

Has anyone tried running FreeBSD 5.x on one of these yet? Does it
actually boot up and run correctly? Does the cardbus bridge work?
(Hi Warner!) Does the ATA controller work? And, most important of all,
does anyone know if the built-in camera can be made to work? In the
Picturebook, the camera is a PCI device, and I have a special capture
utility installed to operate it. However the camera in the TR2A appears
to be a USB device, and I have no idea what chip it uses. It has been
suggested that it might work with gphoto, but I have no proof of this
one way or the other.

All the other hardware in the TR2A should work with FreeBSD and XFree86,
except possibly for the modem. It has two USB 2.0 ports, firewire, built-in
Intel 82559 10/100 ethernet, Intel 82852/82855 graphics, Centrino 802.11b
wireless, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and a 40GB disk. About the only thing I don't
like about it is the fact that it doesn't come with a recovery media
DVD. Instead, it has a recovery 'partition' on the disk, and somewhere
there is an option to burn your own set of recovery CDs -- _nine_ of
them!

Any info anyone can offer would be much appreciated. I would love to
get one of these things running with FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE on it.

-Bill

--
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-Bill Paul            (510) 749-2329 | Senior Engineer, Master of Unix-Fu
                 wpaul at windriver.com | Wind River Systems
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              <adamw> you're just BEGGING to face the moose
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