Laptop suggestions?

[Chuck Robey]

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Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Razmig K <strontium90 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> How about Dell models which come with Ubuntu preinstalled? (Inspiron 1525N
>> and 1420N, XPS M1330). Don't they have higher chances of running FreeBSD
>> smoothly? A quick glance over the hardware notes of 7.0-RELEASE and some
>> googling around show that wireless, video and audio are supported.
>>
> 
> One problem with most of the Dell offerings is that they use the NVidia
> video chipset.  Now this is a plus if you're into playing a few games, but
> it sucks if you're running FreeBSD.

There is a problem is you're running the AMD64 chipsets, but I'm running a quad
core processor here, and my Nvidia card (8600GTS) with it's compiled Nvidia
driver works just fine.

  One of the original requests was for
>> 4G RAM.  The NVidia binary driver only works on IA32, not AMD64 (and the
> opensource driver sucks at even 2D), so your RAM is practically limited to
> around 3.5G (depending on a few things).  I also havn't seen very many
> laptops advertising >4G yet (4G, but not more than 4G).
> 
> Personally, I have the XPS-1730.  Largely I tolerate the slow binary driver
> for AMD64.  I use IA32 when I need wine, but my use of ZFS (the 1730 has an
> option for 2 hard drives) seems to eat up kernel memory until wine can't
> start pretty quickly.  The opensource driver does work and supports nice
> things like DPMS ---- it's just that the 2D acceleration feels very lacking
> and it also can't do things like scale a movie at full frame rate.  This
> means that I tend to reboot into windoze for entertainment ... since I can't
> generally use IA32 mode productively anyways.
> 
> Other than the video and the fact that I've never seen a Dell suspend
> successfully under FreeBSD, The laptop is well supported.  The PCI express
> slots and their contents (USB or PCI) show up fine.  Even the EVDO broadband
> modem is fairly easy to suppport.  I think the only feature without any
> support is the SD card reader.
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