Story of a Desktop User

[Eitan Adler]

[ Meta: I will ask that people please change the subject line if they
want to branch about discussing a particular issue or problem.  This
is a general post and I'm hoping it will generate a lot of discussion
about the broader issues as well as specific problems I encountered. ]

Hi all,

This is a Lenovo Y580 laptop with uname -a:

FreeBSD gravity.local 11.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #5 r257754:
Thu Nov  7 12:12:51 EST 2013
root at gravity.local:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/EADLER  amd64

I've been using FreeBSD on this computer since February 1st, 2013.
During this time I've tried to keep notes to myself about what works
and what doesn't.  I wrote a similar email on February 3rd, 2013 to
mobile at .  This one should be more complete since I have been running
&os; longer. :)  I am running "make buildworld" and will try a more
recent HEAD shortly.

At the moment the trackpad seems to be losing all "click" events.
That is, I can move the mouse pointer around, however X does not
register any mouse click.  I'm not sure what caused this.


if_rue works.  if_run works.  Unfortunately I no longer have either of
these cards.

This laptop comes with a small SSD (16GB) and a large (1TB) HDD.  I
have the operating system installed to the SSD and my homedir and most
other data on the HDD.  Both seem to fuction as expected.  I use ZFS
for all my filesystems including root.  However I frequently noticed
absurdly slow access time to disk.  It can take minutes to run ls -l
on an empty directory.  I do not know if this is the fault of the
disk, the filesystem, or some decision I made when partitioning the
disk.

I needed to setup xbindkeys to make the volume and mute work.  They
are now mapped to "mixer vol".  These keys therefore only work when X
is running.  It would be great if we had a tool "keypressd" which
would allow keypresses to be mapped to run arbitrary userland programs
from both the console as well as X.

The play/stop/rewind/next keys are mapped via xbindkeys to pianobar.
As above, it would be great to have this mapping work in the console.

VT Switching is a well known problem that newcons is aiming to solve.
However, I'll mention it here for completeness: I can not switch to
the console once X has been started (using the new Xorg w/ Intel
drivers).

Related to X: I am running WITH_NEW_XORG.  This laptop has nvidia
optimus.  However, it is not possible to use the nvidia card so I am
stuck with Intel only at the moment.

The sleep key and wireless on/off key do nothing. It would be great to
trap them and do something.

I am able to use webcamd with pwcview to test my camera.  It seems
like it just works.  However webcamd can not be started from rc.conf
last I tested.  It must be started manually.

The hardware switches from speakers to headphones automagically when I
plug in headphones.  I like this behavior but it would be great if
there were a sysctl to disable it.

suspend/resume does not function from X.  I did not test from console.
 I have tried to remove the VESA module but this did not help.
hw.acpi.reset_video=1 also does not help.

The brightness keys on up and down change the ACPI brightness value.
However I see no impact on the screen itself.
It would be great to have some method of streaming ACPI events in
userland (i.e., 'xev' for ACPI).  This would make it easier to debug
what is actually going on here.

The "Enable/Disable" screen key works as expected.  The "switch
screen" key requires xbindkeys support.

At the moment I am unable to get my USB mouse to be recognized at all.
 The driver has trouble attaching.  It was working during -BETA3 so it
seems there is some regression here.

Adrian and Cedric have been working on if_iwn support.  There is
already extensive discussion about this on -wireless.

On to the worse side of things:
/dev/speaker just does not function at all.
if_alc does not function on this laptop.

the boot method must be set to "legacy" in BIOS in order to boot.


Slightly less specific to FreeBSD:
- hexchat and xchat spell check is not functioning despite (a) the
option being selected and (b) the dictionary being installed.
- chrome can not open PDFs inline like it can on other platforms.  I
believe this is a chrome limitation
- the lxpanel battery monitor is non-functional on FreeBSD.  I believe
it used to work but a recent update killed it.





-- 
Eitan Adler