Does someone successfully use this laptop with FreeBSD?

O

osp

Guest
Hi,

For some time I've been wanting to try FreeBSD, but I am always scared away by hw hardware support. I come from the Linux world and even there I didn't buy a PC/laptop without some problem, which I have to battle for days/weeks or give up and live with it.

Now I consider to buy one of these:
  • Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E145
  • Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E440

I chose these two for simple reasons: they are cheap, available and they meet my hw hardware requirements.

I tried to find some good hw hardware support page, where I could search exactly these two models, but I didn't find anything. Is there something like that? Or does someone own one of these laptops? I don't expect wonders, but I need the Ethernet card to work, the Wi-Fi card to work and good (watch movies, proper resolution) support of the graphics chipset (e145 -> Radeon, e440 -> Intel HD) and it would be great if the suspend and fn keys worked.

So, my question is: are those laptops well supported by FreeBSD (I want to install the latest - 11) and does someone has working experience with one of them?

Thank you very much,
FreeBSD Newbie
 
The Radeon video in the E145 is too new to be supported by the Radeon driver in FreeBSD yet.

The E440 appears to be mostly based on Haswell processors, which share a similar problem. Haswell graphics are not supported by the Intel video drivers yet.

The vesa driver might work, without acceleration, and possibly not at the native resolution, on either or both.
 
Thanks for answer. That is too bad, I thought that at least support for opensourced Intel HD graphics could be.
 
jrm said:
osp said:
Thanks for answer. That is too bad, I thought that at least support for opensourced Intel HD graphics could be.
Click to expand...

There is, just not for Haswell yet. According to this, support is coming.
Click to expand...

OK, then I wait for FreeBSD 12 :p

My move on bsd is inevitable anyway thanks to systemd plague on Linux... :) (No really, arrogance of some people knows no bounds)
 
Hi,

I would like to share my experience with Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E145 (E1-2500). I'm running FreeBSD 10.1-BETA3.

- sound works (little problems with auto-detection of a headset, but can be set manually by sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=3)
- xorg works with vesa (native resolution of 1366x768, but no hardware acceleration)
- webcam works
- S3 sleep mode works (zzz)
- fan control also works (acpi_ibm.ko)
- wlan does not work (I'm using ASUS USB-N10 Nano as a workaround)

I hope it's helpful. If you have any questions, just let me know.

Cheers
Marek
 
Last edited by a moderator:
mrkrd said:
Hi,

I would like to share my experience with Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E145 (E1-2500). I'm running FreeBSD 10.1-BETA3.

- sound works (little problems with auto-detection of a headset, but can be set manually by sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=3)
- xorg works with vesa (native resolution of 1366x768, but no hardware acceleration)
- webcam works
- S3 sleep mode works (zzz)
- fan control also works (acpi_ibm.ko)
- wlan does not work (I'm using ASUS USB-N10 Nano as a workaround)

I hope it's helpful. If you have any questions, just let me know.

Cheers
Marek
Click to expand...

Hi, I decide to not buy any of those when there was not good support in FreeBSD and WiFi is kinda fundamental - i don't like lose one usb port because of it. I decided to buy CF-19 toughbook from ebay - now with linux, because I need it for vacation quickly ready, but after then I will try FreeBSD with ssd disk ;)
 
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