Best Laptop to buy for Freebsd Without OS?

[Warren Block]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2011, Henrik Hudson wrote:

> Any of the i3 / i5 systems will be using Optimus, even if they
> don't state as much, and this is not supported under FreeBSD or
> Linux, neither proprietary or FOSS drivers. Some of the higher-end laptops (Lenovo) you can switch off
> optimus either in BIOS or a hardware switch, but a lot of those
> details are hidden behind marketing. It doesn't matter if it's ATI
> or Nvidia, they still route through the Intel HD stack. Some of the
> i7 machines don't do this, but they're also space heaters for the
> most part.

There are about 90 notebooks listed on Newegg with ATI/AMD video that 
should be supported by the 6.13.2 or 6.14.0 xf86-video-ati drivers: 
X1000-series, HD3000-series, and HD4000-series.

72 of them have the Radeon HD4250.  All of those machines have AMD 
processors.  Don't know what is comparable to an i3 or i5, what type of 
wireless chipset may be included, or how good the ACPI support is on any 
of them.  I'd look at Acer, Lenovo, then Dell and HP, maybe Toshiba if 
there was nothing else available.

http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/index.html is relevant more to used 
machines, but always worth checking.  In fact, if you have tried FreeBSD 
on a notebook that isn't on there, please create an entry for it.