Netbooks good for FreeBSD?

[Warren Block]

On Mon, 12 Oct 2009, Yuri wrote:

> I am thinking about buying a netbook. But I am afraid that WiFi wouldn't be 
> supported. And all my previous attempts to make NDIS to work on FreeBSD 
> failed.

The Atheros AR5007 (802.11b/g) works well with FreeBSD 8.  That card 
comes with the Acer Aspire One AOA150 and I think some models of Asus 
netbooks.  There was a Broadcom in an Acer notebook that had never 
worked with FreeBSD, and replacing that with another AR5007 worked fine. 
These mini-PCIe cards are easy to replace, at least if the physical 
design of the computer makes them accessible.

A later model of Atheros, the AR5008X (AR5416), did not quite work with 
FreeBSD:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2009-September/011768.html

> There is a page about Asus Eee: http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee with 
> mixed results.

They have a good group effort there.  Some of the information applies to 
other brands of netbook, and it would be nice to see that expanded to 
cover them.

> Does this mean that Asus Eee are the best supported/known machines?

Possibly.  The Aspire One does pretty well except for suspend/resume, 
and I think that's a problem with FreeBSD on most or all SMP notebooks.

> I was thinking about Lenovo S10-2.

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=5902

> Is there a hardware compatibility list for FreeBSD?

http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA