Dell laptops

[Patrick Hurrelmann]

M. Warner Losh wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> What are the current problems, if any, on current Dell laptops have
> with FreeBSD?
> 
> Warner

Hi Warner,

I really like Dells. Especially the Latitude-series. Personally I run 
FreeBSD on a Latitude D600 since 5.1-CURRENT. All works like a charm, 
except ACPI suspend/resume and the Broadcom WLAN. It was exchanged by a 
  ath-card some years ago.

At work I have my hands on several Latitude D610, but I never managed to 
try FreeBSD on them. But I have good reports from FreeBSD-users.

Since some weeks I own a Latitude D620 (DualCore) and it really rocks, 
altough some things don't work atm. ACPI suspend/resume doesn't work at 
all like usual. Intel 3945ABG WLAN (even NDIS fails) and Intel HDA audio 
are unsupported (patches from multimedia@ won't build) at the moment. I 
did not test hotkeys till know. Xorg works like a charm, too. I chose 
the embedded nVidia Quadro graphics card :)

Some other glitches:
  - Gigabit nic (bge) only works with a patch, but it still gets firmware
    handshake timeouts (see current@)
  - SATA needs patch with updated PCI-IDs
  - usb (UHCI) also needs patch with updated PCI-IDs

But the overall performance, design and handling rocks on this one. I 
can highly recommend this one. I'm very optimistic in getting it quite 
well supported in the near future.

Patrick

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Patrick Hurrelmann   | "Programming today is a race between software
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