Best $1000 Freebsd laptop?

[Anthony Jenkins]

----- Original Message -----

> From: Xn Nooby <xnooby at gmail.com>
> To: freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> Cc: 
> Sent: Tuesday, November 8, 2011 8:20 AM
> Subject: Best $1000 Freebsd laptop?
> 
> I bought a laptop that has an unsupported video card, so now it is my
> "windows laptop".  I am thinking of getting another to be my 
> "freebsd
> laptop", so I want to make sure it really works with FreebSD.  I could
> probably spend <$1000 (USD) on one.  I like the look of the Lenovos
> but I am unfamiliar with all the different models, and have never
> bought anything from their webstore.  I normally buy from Dell or
> Amazon, and I never buy used or refurbished (unless its a car!).
> 
> My main requirements are having long battery life, opengl graphics,
> vtx suppoort (virtualization).  A decent drive (500+GB) and ram (6GB+)
> would be nice.  I can't believe ZFS needs 6GB+ ram, and I am not sure
> I would want to get a lot of ram, just so I could use ZFS.  On the
> other hand, I read that UFS is getting old.  I would rather use RAM
> for running virtual machines.
> 
> I'm scared to death of getting another machine that has an unsupported
> video card (like nvidia optimus), or no VTX.  I want a long lasting
> machine that I can travel with, take to work, and not be limited by.
> My windows laptop is an i3 with VTX, and is a little under-powered, so
> I am thinking of an i5+.  I don't do a lot of number-crunching, but I
> don't want it to be slow, either.
> 
> Any suggestions?

I'm running a fairly old 
9.0-CURRENT (9.0-CURRENT #7: Wed Aug 17 09:34:34 EDT 2011) on a cheap 
Acer Aspire 5552-7803 (~$400 USD) with an AMD Phenom II X4 CPU & the max 8GB RAM installed.  On-board Atheros wi-fi and suspend/resume work 
fine, I run VirtualBox VMs and I believe accelerated X stuff works...

Well maybe not - I'm running KDE4 
and just tried pulling up OpenGL info dialog which crashed my X session.  Other 
minor problems are the box seems to become less stable the more times I 
suspend/resume without an intervening reboot, but I consider that a 
minor annoyance.  I also added code to /etc/rc.resume to restart the wireless network because the suggested 'wpa_cli reassociate' was hit-or-miss.  I haven't done any ZFS tuning to limit the amount of 
memory ZFS uses, might do that soon.  I have a ZFS-on-root system.

Anthony Jenkins