What laptop do you recommend?

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 10:32:40 -0300
> From: freebsd at meijome.net
> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> 
> hi everyone,
> I'm looking for a new, gruntier laptop. What laptop is known to work
> WELL with freeBSD? e.g.:
> 
> ACPI with no problems (and as many features as possible)
> PATA / SATA with no problems
> all other basic stuff (graphics, NIC, Wireless g, sound,
> touchpad ,etc ) should work too, of course
> 
> Looking into either Intel duo Core or AMD64 chips.
> 
> >From what I've read, IBMs seem to have quite good support, so do DELLs
> (though they seem chunkier than other laptops). I usually get Toshiba,
> but I don't think they are so well supported.

I have a new Lenovo (IBM) T43 (266875U) that is working well.

If you get an integrated A/B/G card, it's Athros based and works very
well with FreeBSD and the wpa_supplicant.  The internal Winmodem is
useless, though. The GE is a Broadcom which works well. Graphics is an
ATI Radeon, so you will want to have Radeontool to turn it off.

ACPI has no problems and, if you load acpi_ibm, it provides lots of
features. Sound is snd_ich and works fine. I disable the touchpad, so I
really can't say much about it. If the touchpad is disabled, it has a 3
button mouse.

I have not been successful with a suspend/resume cycle while running
X. It seems to suspend, but never resumes when in X. If I'm on a vty, it
does resume, but the display characters are garbage.  "vidcontrol mode
80x25" fixes it, though. I can probably stick this into rc.resume.

It's only a 2GHz Pentium-M, though. The new T60s are Core Duo systems,
but we don't have one, yet. One was just ordered last week, so I hope to
get to play with one soon.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634