Suitability of Sony VAIO laptop for FreeBSD?

[Patrick Tracanelli]

[..]

> Any warnings as far as running FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x (or 6) on such a
> beast?

Hail,

I've been playing around w/ RELENG_5 on the following laptops

Toshiba Satellite A45-S250 (dvd-rw)
Toshiba Satellite P25-S670 (dvd-rw)
Toshiba Satellite A60 (cd-rw+dvd combo)
Sony Vaio PCG - FRV37 (dvd-rw)
ECS A Transmeta - 530 (combo cd-rw+dvd combo)

You did not mention the Vaio model but according to the hardware setup
it is close to the same computer as the noted above, except for the
optical drive, the one I played is DVD-RW.

FreeBSD 5 simply does not install 'cos it is unable to control the
optical device, so it does not load sysinstall; I commented about this
misbehaviour on -current some times, but it did not change up to 5.3-R.

It shows up the sabe behaviour on 6.0-CURRENT, also does not control the
optical stuff (dies on READ_BIG timeout/interrupt (trying 2 more
times)). The solution is network install when possible (most laptops
does not have floppy devices anymore, so a network boot would be necessary).

But among beasties, 4.10-RELEASE just works very nice, luckly;
DragonFlyBSD 1.0a also works. burncd(8) works great on 4.10-RELEASE
while it doesnt on DfBSD.

NetBSD also controls everything nicely, but I did not get long testing 
it under NetBSD since the goal for the laptop is strictly running FreeBSD.

The deal? The Vaio system today runs both, 4.10 and 5.3-R, the first one 
gets loaded only when dvd writing is needed, and atapicd is not even on 
the 5.3-R kernel 'cos even after the network install RELENG_5 takes a 
long to boot, 'til it times out controlling the device.

-- 
Atenciosamente,

Patrick Tracanelli