"A IBM R40e report for FreeBSD users" or: "I want to buy a R40e, so is the R40e compatible with FreeBSD?"

[Ludwig Schreier]

Hi community,

I am reporting about the new IBM R40e notebook and its compatibility 
with FreeBSD.

Starting with a little bit of history, I want to let you know that I am 
a german student in applied science and since students have a huge lack 
of money,
they need to look for good prices on computers. IBM made it. They're 
selling the R40e, a smart notebook with all the power and quality we 
expect from IBM.
I've searched the mobile mailing list on issues on R40e, but didn't 
found many articles, so this document / briefing will be interesting to 
person who
either are using a R40e with FreeBSD or want to buy one _or_ developers 
of technical genre (...).

I bought it a couple of months ago and I am using FreeBSD for almost 
one year now (on different i386 machines, not only the notebook).

Im not aware of all the problems that already got solved by persons, so 
the threads below are just my personal problems & solutions I 
approached by
installing and playing around with FreeBSD [...].


To let you know:

4.9 doesn't support the PC-CARD (PCMCIA) at 32-bit for this notebook. 
(I have to mention: I didn't take a look at the custom / generic build 
kernel of 4.9 maybe this option is disabled ...)

*-4.9 _doesn't_ know the onboard Broadcom driver set (located at the 
back of the laptop) while 5.2.1 _does_ and makes you able to forget 
about a PC-CARD (5.x supports 32-bit cards) for Ethernet services of 
any kind.

The onboard graphic chip-set doesn't know the VESA mode for a better 
resolution on the terminals. (After a while I was fine with it, and if 
you become familiar enough with FreeBSD, you will use the X Windows 
system, especially for a notebook as its not a main-frame server 
system.)

I didn't look for the onboard sound capabilities yet, because I mind to 
play music when trying to learn programming.

Some ACPI errors occur at the booting prompt.

http://mitglied.lycos.de/wildcat101/docs/dmesg.today

(5.1-RELEASE ... I will upload a 5.2.1-RELEASE dmesg.today soon too.)

I searched two weeks on this and started with: What is ACPI actually? 
Finally I didn't make any changes to any ACPI driver set, because it 
didn't make any major problems to the system.

Best wishes,

---

Ludwig Schreier