FreeBSD on Asus A6K ?

[Martin Roos]

Hi, i was wondering if there's anyone around here that is running freebsd
6.x on their shiny asus a6k laptop?

 I have been using linux for a while on this one, but the bloatware that
linux has
become by the year of 2006 is just killing me, so i'm seriously considering
to switch
my laptop over to freebsd. For now i think i'd go for the i386 distro still
...
(althrough the amd64 is here, it's not that ready yet).

 The specs of the laptop itself are these :

Cpu: AMD Turion(tm) 64 Mobile Technology MT-30
Ram: 1gb 400mhz ddr
Motherboard: SIS 756 nortbridge, isa sis965, ide sis5513
HDD: ata/ide 60gb Hitachi
dvd-drive: TSSTcorpCD/DVDW TS-L532U
NIC: realtek 8139
Sound: SIS sound (lspci shows1039:7012, i guess it's sis 7012 )
Graphics: nvidia 6200 go with 128mb ded.+128mb of possible sys. ram ()
Wifi: broadcom 4318**
FireWire: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394
USB: Sis usb controller of some kind (lspci shows 1039:7001 and 1039:7002 on
usb1/usb2 accordingly)
SD Card reader: Ricoh (lspci shows 1180:0822)
Webcam: Syntek Semicon. (lspci shows 0x174f:0xa311) , appearantly this
should be m560x camera*
Other: synaptics touchpad and the regular unused 'extra keys' on the
keyboard

*- there's some work going on in http://m560x.x3ng.com/wiki/CurrentState
** - appearantly http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ is already making it's way to
linux kernel

I ran freebsd in the vmplayer and the cpu at least in there seemed to do
fine.
I guess the nic and sound should work also, same for the chipset items.
acpi in the bios is broken, so i'd rather disable the acpi for the start and

live on just the regular apm. i really don't have time nor the need to fix
it.
The nvidia graphics and the firewire should be fine too by the freebsd doc,
i guess the usb will work too.

Now there are a few question marks in the air ...

*the dvd/rw drive ? (it works fine under linux and win, i guess it should be
ok) ?
*broadcom wifi, is there already a builtin way to run it directly without
ndis ?
*has anyone the slightest clue if the builtin cardreader would ever work ?
*it has a builtin usb based webcam (weird hack it seems) anyone on that
frontier ?
*is there anything in the hw list that rings a red bell bigtime ?

there are rumors runnning around that the linux kernel has merged a
builtin driver for the broadcom card, this is kind of a good news, any
chance that this will be ported to freebsd too ? (i'm still not sure how
they have resolved the firmware issue). is it difficult to port the wifi
drivers from linux's kernel to freebsd ?

I think i will try out 6.1 install cd once it comes out and do as
many prechecks as i can before installing, but if someone has
some nice information to share on the specific questionable
items listed, you're knowledge is welcome :)

ps. if anyone has encouraging advice to go for amd64 branch instead,
please add some notes to it and if you're even nearly sure that anything
will work in there :p

--
##########
Martin Roos - yeah, sis is crap, but it was the only normal amd64 laptop out
there at the time