Workstation recommendations

Good day all,

I am looking to get myself a workstation for dual booting Windows and FreeBSD. Being lazy lately, I am leaning towards buying a name brand machine as opposed to building one from parts. It will be used for hobby programming, some document editing, no games (so I don't care much for an expensive video card).

My question, is which brands/series can run FreeBSD more or less trouble free? Also, how well does the FreeBSD installer handle UEFI, I've never installed it on modern machines.

Thanks in advance!
 
In general, FreeBSD should run fine on any standard machine. Very recent hardware, like Haswell CPUs or AMD APUs, is only partly supported at present. I have not tried the installer with UEFI yet. Machines with UEFI should still allow booting from "legacy" media, but dual-booting is likely to make that much more complicated. As usual, I suggest considering running one of the operating systems as a VM host and the other as a VM guest. This is easier and safer to set up and allows running both at the same time.

If you have a specific model being considered, post it and we can see if there are any obvious problems.
 
Good day all,
I am looking to get myself a workstation for dual booting Windows and FreeBSD. Being lazy lately, I am leaning towards buying a name brand machine as opposed to building one from parts. It will be used for hobby programming, some document editing, no games (so I don't care much for an expensive video card).

I am not sure about Windows stuff but based upon what you described I would go with a WISE thin client which is $100 in U.S. 5 watts of electricity, no heat, no noise. While I was at a faculty at Georgia State I had one of those as my "desktop machine" running OpenBSD. The client is a little bit bigger than a pack of cigarettes.


For the second part of your question the best way to deal with UEFI is to just disable it.
 
msbic

Your specification is somewhat poor. You might want to tell us a little more, like class of CPU power, networking needs, extension desires (large box with lots of slots?) etc.

Very broadly speaking I have had good experiences with (Siemens)Fujitsu and IBM/Lenovo, ranging from quite small desktop boxes up to rather large servers.
 
I am not sure about Windows stuff but based upon what you described I would go with a WISE thin client which is $100 in U.S. 5 watts of electricity, no heat, no noise. While I was at a faculty at Georgia State I had one of those as my "desktop machine" running OpenBSD. The client is a little bit bigger than a pack of cigarettes.


For the second part of your question the best way to deal with UEFI is to just disable it.

Thanks. I would need something like that, but for other purposes, like running a small web server.
 
msbic

Your specification is somewhat poor. You might want to tell us a little more, like class of CPU power, networking needs, extension desires (large box with lots of slots?) etc.

Very broadly speaking I have had good experiences with (Siemens)Fujitsu and IBM/Lenovo, ranging from quite small desktop boxes up to rather large servers.

Thanks. I'd like a machine with an i5 Intel CPU. I don't need anything exceptional from the point of view of networking. 1Gbps network card will more than suffice (and they are pretty standard these days). I also don't need many available slots, possibly a PCI-e slot in case I'd want to buy a more powerful video card. But then again, this isn't even a must if the built-in adapter works well enough.

I had previously heard good things about IBM/Lenovo. It's good to know this is still the case.
 
Yes, indeed. While I wouldn't heartedly recommend e.g. thinkstations as preferred choice, I haven't made bad experiences either. Based on what you just told, one of those small factor think-boxen might be just what you're looking for. I found them quite reliable.
 
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