Laptop suggestions please

[Bruno Ducrot]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 03:28:33PM +0200, Jeremie Le Hen wrote:
> Hi Espen, hi Christopher,
> 
> > >>Anyone know of a laptop that FreeBSD supports well
> > >>enough to use all of its capabilities?
> > >>
> > 
> > Stay away from all modern Acer laptops. They use "Smart batteries" which 
> > is not supported in FreeBSD yet. That means you'll be unable to retrieve 
> > battery information. It's on the ACPI todo list, but it's not 
> > implemented yet, not even on CURRENT.
> 
> I bought an Acer Extensa 4100 and I could get the battery state
> immediately due to standard DSDT (see this thread).  Brunot Ducrot
> fixed this for me, but it still need to use the following lines in
> loader.conf(5) :
> %%%
>     acpi_dsdt_load="YES"
>     acpi_dsdt_name="/boot/DSDT.aml"
> %%%
> 

Well, the problem is a little bit different in your case.

The smart battery stuff via ACPI is still under devellopment because
it is under normal ACPI specification, and this will be likely
merged this year (at least in -current).

Your problem is a real bug in the DSDT, and require a workaround which
in any case will break ACPI specification.  For now, I'm not sure if
such workaround will be done, and if one is written, we have to check
twice it will not break too much the ACPI interpreter.

-- 
Bruno Ducrot

--  Which is worse:  ignorance or apathy?
--  Don't know.  Don't care.