Dell E6330

[Ian Smith]

On Sun, 27 Jul 2014 13:03:20 -0600, Warren Block wrote:
 > On Sun, 27 Jul 2014, Matthias Apitz wrote:
 > 
 > > El día Sunday, July 27, 2014 a las 10:56:26AM -0700, Adrian Chadd escribió:
 > >
 > >> http://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops
 > >>
 > >> Please add it and all the details you have!
 > >
 > > I went to the page (and I will later add the details of the bunch of
 > > laptops and netbooks I have), but ... there are 11 (eleven!!!) laptops
 > > only :-(
 > >
 > > the page I was talking about, the laptop compat list, had hundreds, I
 > > think; the page is down for years now and I tried to get in contact to
 > > the folks running the database with web frontend to get at least the
 > > data in some structured way and put them somewhere on my web space...

Matthias, might you ask again?  At least you speak the language, and 
yes, it would be very good to recover that data.  Sure it was a bit 
overwhelmed by drive-by spammers in its latter years, but anyone with a 
handle on (say) phpmyadmin could likely clean that data up in a day.

 > http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd
 > 
 > DNS is not resolving for it now.  Several years ago, it had been down 
 > for a while, but I managed to contact the admin and they restarted it. 
 > There were problems with spammers, but it was often useful.

I've been trying there every maybe few months for the last year, or so.  
The domain is still registered, both bsdgroup.de and laptop.bsdgroup.de 
(cname www.bsdgroup.de) are in DNS, but haven't responded for .. ages.

I found it so useful that I bought a couple of Thinkpad T23s in (IIRC) 
'06, on the strength that Nate Lawson had developed lots of the ACPI 
code on one and it was one of the few then that suspended and resumed 
reliably, and then only after a particular tweak was enabled, ie
hw.syscons.sc_no_suspend_vtswitch=1.

Not that that particular detail is relevant, just that the layout lent 
itself to various people adding notes about what worked, what didn't, 
under which OS versions, and things to try .. with pointers to dmesgs.

 > Really, we need a program that identifies hardware and reports the 
 > drivers available.  There may be something out there already which we 
 > could use, like HDT: http://hdt-project.org/

Well there's dmidecode, which has all the info but not in such a useful 
form.  dmesg snippets for different subsystems - esp these days as noted 
for wireless and graphics, but to people like me (if any? :) things like 
reliable suspend/resume are just as important, and that's often very OS 
version-dependent.  FLCL encouraged multiple reports; it was a bit too 
easy for spammers, but easy enough that Joe Punter could add his stuff.

Is bsdstats still running?  That had some utility re what people ran, 
and was enabled by default on some earlier version (7 maybe?) though I 
also recall some controversy about privacy or security at one stage.

 > Right now, for example, end users have no easy way of telling which 
 > wireless driver they need, or whether their card is supported at all.

Indeed, which especially with newer laptops often enough leads to "sorry 
we don't support that one yet .."  People really need something to refer 
to - beyond the supported hardware notes - to guide purchasing of newer 
(or indeed older) laptops for use with FreeBSD.

 > The results of a detection program could be submitted to a web page 
 > which others could check.

I vote that you be permitted to proceed :)

cheers, Ian