Help with Dell Precision M4800 (laptop)?

[David Wolfskill]

I have had quite good experiences running FreeBSD on a Dell Precision
M4400 -- enough so I bought a refurbished one when my original one was
going to be going in for (warranty) repair for a couple of weeks.

Unfortunately, the M4400 is no long a very recent model, and wht with
rebuilding FreeBSD a couple of times per day (stable/10 & head), as well
as updating all installed ports daily, as well as more "normal" (ab)use,
the M4400s are wearing out, and I had extended the Dell warranty as far as
it could go -- and that expired a couple of years ago (after 5 years of
warranty).

I had hoped that the Precision M4800 would be a somewhat-updated model
that would be similar to the M4400.  Once I opened the box and found
that I needed to get the hardware documentation in order to swap the
disk drive (as I had no intention of running MS Windows, ever, and I had
just purchased a larger, faster disk drive that already had FreeBSD on
it), I realized that things might be a bit difficult.

Here's the current status:
+ FreeBSD (both stable/10 & head) boots (desite an occasional "invalid
  partition table!" BIOS message at boot).

+ The wired NIC is still an em(4), so that works OK.

- Although I have empirical evidence that BIOS A13 is available, the
  machine arrived with A11 in place.

- The wireless NIC appears to be a Broadcom device, and I haven't been
  able to persuade it to be recognized by a driver yet.

- I tried swapping in an Atheros NIC; that would occasionally associate,
  but never lit the "WiFi" status light, and it was intermittent at best.

- Despite updating to the recent x11/nvidia-driver port, I have been
  unable (so far) to get X running.  (It whines about an inability to
  find any screens.)

- Attempts to suspend (to RAM) have uniformly failed so far.  I have
  thus not attempted to resume.

- The keyboard is rather larger than that of the M4400 -- it has a
  numeric keypad; unfortunately, the tactile feedback is very different
  from that of the M4400.  Worse, the touchpad is way over to the left
  side of the palmrest (which I find pretty annoying).

- The screen is only 1080 pixels tall (vs. the 1200 I'm used to).  Yeah,
  I understand why; that doesn't mean I need to either like it or pretend
  that it's a Good Thing.


I've placed a handful of files under
<http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/FreeBSD/m4800/>:

Xorg.0.log
Xorg.1.log
  A couple of attempts to start X.

m4800.dmi
  Output of "dmidecode"

m4800.pci
  Output of "pciconf -lv

xorg.conf
  One of the X.org config files I tried using


I'll try grabbing a dmesg.boot and adding that in when I get a chance
(probably tonight).

I welcome suggestions for getting the machine to work as well as the
M4400s did in their prime. :-}

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Those who murder in the name of God or prophet are blasphemous cowards.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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