Cheap laptop recommendation

cracauer@ said:
It's a mess buying laptops, and I mean not only for FreeBSD, for Linux and Windows, too. There always some details the vendor screwed up or things that have drivers, but bad drivers.

I had wished for the Laptop working group to focus on the Thinkpad Carbon X1 and get one of each generation for testing. But for now that seems to be targeted at Framework.
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Yes too many devices with not enough testing giving flaky user experiences.
So Frameworks have the attention, but expensive second hand I guess? Not looked at one yet on ebay but will do.

Looked, almost no framework laptops on ebay and expensive. Back to T14 gen 1 AMD I think.
 
froggit9000 said:
Yes too many devices with not enough testing giving flaky user experiences.
So Frameworks have the attention, but expensive second hand I guess? Not looked at one yet on ebay but will do.
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I wouldn't mind that Frameworks are a bit more expensive, but from what I see people don't have very positive experiences out there. Not sure how up to date my impression is.
 
cracauer@ said:
I wouldn't mind that Frameworks are a bit more expensive, but from what I see people don't have very positive experiences out there. Not sure how up to date my impression is.
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Hmm I wonder why?
Anyway there was only one on ebay I saw and that was about three times more than I wanted to pay, so...T14 I think.
 
froggit9000 said:
Hmm I wonder why?
Anyway there was only one on ebay I saw and that was about three times more than I wanted to pay, so...T14 I think.
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I think the BIOS is not very good on Frameworks. Which is excusable given their low volumes. But it needs workarounds that FreeBSD doesn't have. The Carbon X1 is absolutely mass-market in comparison.
 
cracauer@ said:
I think the BIOS is not very good on Frameworks. Which is excusable given their low volumes. But it needs workarounds that FreeBSD doesn't have. The Carbon X1 is absolutely mass-market in comparison.
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That's a pity as a good solid BIOS is the heart of the machine and for good performance etc.
Is this Carbon X1 good hardware? What's the FreeBSD compatibility like?
 
froggit9000 said:
That's a pity as a good solid BIOS is the heart of the machine and for good performance etc.
Is this Carbon X1 good hardware? What's the FreeBSD compatibility like?
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I only have a 4th gen with an i7-6600U but I don't remember what it did in FreeBSD. It's currently on Linux DAW duty. If that model interests you I could give it a spin.
 
cracauer@ said:
I only have a 4th gen with an i7-6600U but I don't remember what it did in FreeBSD. It's currently on Linux DAW duty. If that model interests you I could give it a spin.
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What's the cpu core specs etc? 2 cores 4 threads - from quick look?
I can't find any of that model on ebay for some reason.
 
froggit9000 said:
What's the cpu core specs etc? 2 cores 4 threads - from quick look?
I can't find any of that model on ebay for some reason.
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Yeah, sounds about right on the core count.

Probably sold out due to good compatibility and they often come with 16 GB RAM. They were nice workhorses.
 
cracauer@ said:
Yeah, sounds about right on the core count.

Probably sold out due to good compatibility and they often come with 16 GB RAM. They were nice workhorses.
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I saw a good condition Thinkpad T14 gen 1 AMD 4650u 16GB model available online recently and decided to give in to my impulses to buy it...nice laptop!
After a few hours of battling with the 15.1-RELEASE memstick installer and setting it up, all seems to be working well so far. I haven't tested everything but I got the amdgpu driver working with X11 and installed the renoir gpu firmware packages, ethernet worked out of the box, XFCE 4.20 installed fine with the lightdm-gtk-greeter for graphical login.
For some reason if I take it on the road and have no ethernet connected the mousepad doesn't seem to work but the red joystick button on the keyboard works ok in that case.
The size of the laptop is fine too: not too chunky.
I got Doom Emacs installed with org-mode, org-roam and org-roam-ui for managing loads of research files etc, so all good.
Now I just need to figure out how to mount the SDcard. It doesn't seem to want to mount it for some reason. It was previously formatted with the Linux ext4 file system if I remember correctly.
Code: 
# mount /dev/mmcsd0 /mnt
mount: /dev/mmcsd0: No such file or directory
# ls /dev/mmcsd0
/dev/mmcsd0
Thanks for the recommendation :)
 
A used quality brand with mainstream hardware beats a new cheapie model.

FBSD is more likely to know this older mainstream hardware.

I favor Dell because they are very serviceable, especially BIOS.
 
Alain De Vos said:
First,
ls /dev
If you found good then do,
Code: 
file -s thatone
Click to expand...

Thanks, here's the output:
Code: 
# file -s /dev/mmcsd0
/dev/mmcsd0: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=... (extents) (64bit) (large files) (huge files)

I don't care about keeping the contents though, so I would like to just make it a 256GB ZFS pool and file system.
But maybe ZFS is not suitable for SD cards?

I originally bought the sd card for a linux tablet but I'm thinking of selling the linux tablet as I'm an all freebsd shop here now. I used it just to do a cron timed backup of files from the tablet's main file system home directory onto the sd card.

Now I've moved the sd card into this thinkpad laptop I just thought I'd do similar - use it to backup home directory files onto the sd card, as this laptop only has a single NVMe SSD - so it has no redundancy built in yet.

So my current thinking is to make the sd card a zfs pool and file system on it, but it could be another freebsd file system if it isn't ZFS.

Any thoughts on this idea?

Maybe start be zeroing out the sd card using dd? That took too long - aborted.

It seems I might need other tools to access this MMC card:
Code: 
# pkg search mmc
mmc-utils-20230807_1           Userspace tools for MMC/SD devices
 
an sd card is mostly small , i would advice
Code: 
gpart destroy -F /dev/x
gpart create -s gpt /dev/x
gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -l my_sdcard /dev/x
newfs -U /dev/gpt/my_sdcard

small add nice
 
Alain De Vos said:
an sd card is mostly small , i would advice
Code: 
gpart destroy -F /dev/x
gpart create -s gpt /dev/x
gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -l my_sdcard /dev/x
newfs -U /dev/gpt/my_sdcard

small add nice
Click to expand...

Hey thanks, that worked:

Code: 
# gpart destroy -F /dev/mmcsd0
gpart: arg0 'mmcsd0': Invalid argument
#
# gpart create -s gpt /dev/mmcsd0
mmcsd0 created
#
# zpool create backup /dev/mmcsd0
#
# zpool list
NAME     SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
backup   238G   396K   238G        -         -     0%     0%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
zroot    236G  8.92G   227G        -         -     0%     3%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
#
# zfs list
NAME                                        USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
backup                                      396K   231G    96K  /backup
 
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