Laptop suggestions?

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 8:56 PM, Frank Mayhar <frank at exit.com> wrote:


> After reading all the replies I'm actually taking your suggestion and
> going with Fujitsu, specifically the E8420.  I'm getting the NVidia
> option and I'll be running in i386 mode until FreeBSD can handle the
> nvidia requirements for amd64 mode.  Atheros wireless, WSXGA+ option and
> 2GB upgradable to 4.  I'll keep my fingers crossed with regard to
> working suspend/resume but again I'm not holding my breath.  They claim
> that with the 8-cell main and 6-cell modular battery it has a 5:30
> runtime; we'll see.


Having had several fujitsu's before the current run of Dell laptops, I
always found them better than average for FreeBSD support.  Even (last one I
had) suspending to RAM.  The Dells I've currently been buying are very high
end models and my impression of Dell is that their cheap models are not
worth bothering with, their middle of the price range models are mostly
acceptable with some lemons and their high end systems are very well done.

That said, an OS-level suspend-to-disk would be an awesome summer-of-code
project.  I was thinking that beyond swapping everything out (probably easy
enough) and providing a clue to a newly booted OS that the processes had to
be reactiveated, we'd need a method of remembering what file handles were
connected to so that they could be "reopened" (in this, I envision some type
of text string... maybe a URI/URL).  As a bonus, this would give us process
migration between systems, too (assuming the URI were portable between self
same systems --- which isn't horribly hard with nfs mounts and whatnot).