Netbook purchase

dburkland · #1 June 20th, 2009, 03:52

I have been trying to research as much as possible on the perfect netbook to run FreeBSD on and I'm having a bit of trouble with that. I am wondering if it is possible for all the netbook owners here who run FreeBSD to post their model name and any hardware that is not working properly.

Thank you all so much!

Dan

leo2501 · #2 June 20th, 2009, 09:23

i have a MSI Wind, not running FreeBSD now, but research a lot about it's hardware so, the only thing that is keeping me from trying is the RTL8101E ethernet and RTL8187SE Wireless LAN, that don't have native BSD drivers, that linux have, and the intel 945G graphic xorg driver is giving me so much trouble, that i stay away from xorg 7.4, im using 7.3 right now, because i tryed everything and i get a lot of crashes, non starting X, garbled text, non working vga output...

the rest of the system is perfectly supported, as they are almost standard HDD/SDD and RAM configurations

so the thing is, that you get a one with a supported wireless card, and to workaround the intel + xorg 7.4 issues

dburkland · #3 June 20th, 2009, 18:09

Thanks for your kind reply, I have been eyeing a EEEpc 1000HE but according to wiki.freebsd.org the Wifi chipset isn't supported yet

.

Daisuke_Aramaki · #4 June 20th, 2009, 21:42

i run freebsd 7.2 on my eee1000h. the wireless doesn't work, and i still haven't had the proper time to try out ndisgen. i occasionally take my eee to my office and since i am on a wired network, i don't really bother about wireless. Ethernet is supported automatically by ale0 driver in FreeBSD. Rest of the stuff, work fine. Camera, no need for me, so didn't check it. Hotkeys work fine after some work.

Performance wise, i have had no issues. its pretty fast and highly responsive and X works without issues, and touchpad worked fine.

so if you primarily aim to use it in wireless mode (which i believe most would), then investigate a little further and try to find one that has FreeBSD support. Else you can always get a usb wireless that is supported by FreeBSD and use EEE1000HE without any problems!

dburkland · #5 June 20th, 2009, 21:46

Awesome that's good to know because that was the one I'm about to buy. I really would like the integrated wireless to work does anybody know if a driver is in development?

Thanks!

leo2501 · #6 June 20th, 2009, 21:55

look here... when I update my netbook in a couple of years hopefully I'll look here... http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.2R/hardware.html#WLAN and i HOPE that in that period of time, there are others netbook options, because now you have... intel atom CPU + intel 945G graphic card, and you only choose, hard disk, wifi card and maybe RAM

dburkland · #7 June 20th, 2009, 22:02

I just found this which shows the 1000HE integrated card working on FreeBSD. I just purchased mine so once I receive it I will post back on my results. Thank you all for your input it is greatly appreciated!

leo2501 · #8 June 20th, 2009, 22:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daisuke_Aramaki

i run freebsd 7.2 on my eee1000h. the wireless doesn't work, and i still haven't had the proper time to try out ndisgen. i occasionally take my eee to my office and since i am on a wired network, i don't really bother about wireless. Ethernet is supported automatically by ale0 driver in FreeBSD. Rest of the stuff, work fine. Camera, no need for me, so didn't check it. Hotkeys work fine after some work.

Performance wise, i have had no issues. its pretty fast and highly responsive and X works without issues, and touchpad worked fine.

so if you primarily aim to use it in wireless mode (which i believe most would), then investigate a little further and try to find one that has FreeBSD support. Else you can always get a usb wireless that is supported by FreeBSD and use EEE1000HE without any problems!

I find myself with a lot of trouble in the Xorg aspect... which version of Xorg and intel driver are you using? and THE question is, with that combination, can you use the VGA output? because with xorg 7.4, if i play a movie for example, the computer freezes badly and the only way out is a hard reset

Daisuke_Aramaki · #9 June 21st, 2009, 21:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by leo2501

I find myself with a lot of trouble in the Xorg aspect... which version of Xorg and intel driver are you using? and THE question is, with that combination, can you use the VGA output? because with xorg 7.4, if i play a movie for example, the computer freezes badly and the only way out is a hard reset

If i understood correctly, you don't run FreeBSD7.2 on your netbook right? So I assume that you have these X related issues with the Linux distro you are running?

I have the latest Xorg and intel driver and frankly I have had no issues whatsoever. I have never had a single system hangup so far. And many a time I have built some ports in parallel and have watched a movie at the same time to just test the performance, and I have had no issues.

I have even successfully used this EEE to do some presentations so VGA output worked just fine. Although I never tried playing a movie like that and probably never will. So can't really comment on that.

Before I put FreeBSD on my EEE, I was successfully running Lunar Linux, a source based rolling distro, and I had the latest X and intel driver, and i did not experience any performance issue as well.

matburt · #10 June 22nd, 2009, 22:09

Just noticed the incoming link to my site, thought I'd pop in over here. I've been using FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT on my 1000HE for a little over a month now and it is nice. I'd like to point out that at the time the wireless did not work in 7.2, but the ethernet adapter did. I installed 7.2 following the typical usb-key instructions and once I had 7.2 installed I used it to build CURRENT (which took a little while... I would strongly recommend doing this on another system). I had to do this since all of my other systems run OpenBSD.

My one beef is that suspend doesn't work, and apparently neither does Bluetooth (just found that out today). I suspect this is because of the new USB stack in CURRENT.

I'd give almost anything to have suspend work, I don't have the experience necessary to debug the issue the issue is the same one as mentioned for the S101 here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee#head...ed80f7c3296997

Note that this document is fairly out of date for newer models and the Nighthack site has been down since before I got my system.

Carpetsmoker · #11 June 22nd, 2009, 23:27

IMO the HP 2140 Mini-Note is the best netbook I've had a chance to try, I especially liked the keyboard, it's pretty good for a netbook.

I also think it looks way better than most other netbooks, but I guess this isn't the most important aspect.

Be sure to get the 2133, and not the predecessor, the HP Mini 2133, the 2133 runs pretty hot (Hotter than most notebooks) and battery life isn't that great.

I have never tried to run FreeBSD one them so I can't help you there, but the CPU, chipset, graphics etc. are mostly the same on all netbooks, usually only the wireless NIC is different...

dburkland · #12 June 23rd, 2009, 00:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by matburt

Just noticed the incoming link to my site, thought I'd pop in over here. I've been using FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT on my 1000HE for a little over a month now and it is nice. I'd like to point out that at the time the wireless did not work in 7.2, but the ethernet adapter did. I installed 7.2 following the typical usb-key instructions and once I had 7.2 installed I used it to build CURRENT (which took a little while... I would strongly recommend doing this on another system). I had to do this since all of my other systems run OpenBSD.

My one beef is that suspend doesn't work, and apparently neither does Bluetooth (just found that out today). I suspect this is because of the new USB stack in CURRENT.

I'd give almost anything to have suspend work, I don't have the experience necessary to debug the issue the issue is the same one as mentioned for the S101 here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee#head...ed80f7c3296997

Note that this document is fairly out of date for newer models and the Nighthack site has been down since before I got my system.

Thanks for posting I hope you didn't mind me sharing your blog with the forums

It would be nice if we could get the wiki.freebsd.org/asuseeepc page updated (I will do anything to help)

oliverh · #13 June 29th, 2009, 20:20

My Asus EEE900A works like a charme, with FreeBSD 7.2 and current. I'm using an old Intel 2.5.x driver for Xorg.

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