free bsd on laptops

[Doug Barton]

Before proceeding on the details, there is a more important question.
What is your purpose for setting up a FreeBSD laptop? If your purpose is
to have a reasonable environment on which to do FreeBSD development,
that's fine, we can do that pretty well. If you just want an "open
source OS" to run your laptop, and you want to spend most of your time
actually using things like mail, www, etc.; then FreeBSD is a very poor
choice, you'd be much better off with one of the Linux variants,
particularly Ubuntu.

If your needs are somewhere in between, let us know what you're
attempting to do and we can help you better.

On 08/04/2010 04:59, Mubeesh ali wrote:
> Hi ,
> 
> Thanks david for your  detailed reply.
> 
> I hope these would work in a bsd laptop:
> 
> 
> ATI or NVIDIA graphics card

Both work, sort of.

> hibernate or suspend functionality

Neither is likely to work at all.

> touchpad

Generally this works well, yes.

> built in wireless card  mostly  Intel dot11 N wireless cards

We have no support for .11n, but the .11g features will almost certainly
work.

> datacard ;make qualcomm (bsnl evdo mmx 300 )

Not sure about this one, not likely.

>>> now i am running free bsd in vmware to learn it.

That's great! The Handbook is a great resource, you can find it on the
web site in the Documentation section.

>>        Requirements for laptop
>>
>> * Physical screen resolution of at least 1600x1200.

If you can find a laptop with a display this size, you shouldn't have a
problem, even with X.

>> * Needs to be capable of using 2 batteries at the same time (so a
>>  battery may be swapped out while it's running), which must be
>>  initerchangeable.  It would be best if it were to drain one battery
>>  before switching to the other.

That's a feature of the laptop hardware. Most modern laptops do this.

>> * Must be able to be configured to remain active with the lid closed.
>>  And must be able to cool itself adequately during a "make buildworld"
>>  with the lid closed -- with a suitable -j value for the machine in
>>  question.

You're unlikely to find this. Most modern laptops, especially ones with
multiple cores, run really hot, and depend on having the lid open so
that they can radiate some heat upward.

>> * Primary critical workload is rebuilding FreeBSD & ports; a machine
>>  that is faster at this is better than one that is slower (other
>>  things being equal).

The best things you can do to make this work well are lots of fast RAM,
and the fastest disk(s) you can jam in there.


hth,

Doug

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