FreeBSD on ASUS ROG laptop

[arnab]

Hi, all I am planning to buy an ASUS ROG laptop GL552VX. It has an intel i7 6700HQ processor, 4Gb Nvidia GTX 960m graphics. Now my question is that can I install FreeBSD on it? As I'm not sure about ROG laptop's Linux or FreeBSD support. Will it support FreeBSD out of box? Or will I've to do some extra steps? And one more thing which laptop brand has maximum support for FreeBSD?
Thanks in advance

 

[asys]

When it comes to laptop, there's much to care about beside the CPU(mostly supported) and graphic processor(supported by xorg) as many components cannot easily be changed for another(subject to void warranty) unlike a DIY PC. If your definition of work out-of-box means the system hardware works without much hassle, then you should get a laptop with all supported hardware component. You can find that here: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/hardware.html.

A note on wireless card. Avoid getting any with 802.11ac capability for the mean time as most of them are not supported except maybe a few made by Intel(without 802.11ac capability). Unless you plan on using ethernet the whole time or resort to usb dongle despite having internal wireless card, I highly suggest you take this into account. Supported one should make into this list: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/hardware.html#wlan.

Expect "extra" step if you wanted to use the machine as a desktop. bsdinstall(8) only install the base system. The rest(including x server for GUI) is installed by the user.

 

[arnab]

When it comes to laptop, there's much to care about beside the CPU(mostly supported) and graphic processor(supported by xorg) as many components cannot easily be changed for another(subject to void warranty) unlike a DIY PC. If your definition of work out-of-box means the system hardware works without much hassle, then you should get a laptop with all supported hardware component. You can find that here: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/hardware.html.

A note on wireless card. Avoid getting any with 802.11ac capability for the mean time as most of them are not supported except maybe a few made by Intel(without 802.11ac capability). Unless you plan on using ethernet the whole time or resort to usb dongle despite having internal wireless card, I highly suggest you take this into account. Supported one should make into this list: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/hardware.html#wlan.

Expect "extra" step if you wanted to use the machine as a desktop. bsdinstall(8) only install the base system. The rest(including x server for GUI) is installed by the user.

Thanks for replying. I've a Thinkpad which is pretty old but working fine with Freebsd. No as now I'm in university I need a machine for graphics works and Video editing. So I'm planning to buy a budget gaming laptop. But I'm not sure if it going to support Freebsd and Linux (as it's a new generation hardware) or otherwise I've to live with Windows. Last time I used Windows was 7 on 2012. And after that I am using FreeBSD and Linux. I know that I can check the compatability using PC BSD. But I can check it only after buying it. And if doesn't than it will be a costly blunder to me

 

[SirDice]

I'd recommend just leaving Windows on the laptop and run FreeBSD, Linux and whatever else you want to use inside a VirtualBox VM. Everything on the laptop works with Windows (think wireless, power management, etc). Both FreeBSD and Linux will run without problems inside Virtualbox (fully supported). No fuss with dual or triple boot, and you can run everything at the same time!

 

[asys]

Thanks for replying. I've a Thinkpad which is pretty old but working fine with Freebsd. No as now I'm in university I need a machine for graphics works and Video editing. So I'm planning to buy a budget gaming laptop. But I'm not sure if it going to support Freebsd and Linux (as it's a new generation hardware) or otherwise I've to live with Windows. Last time I used Windows was 7 on 2012. And after that I am using FreeBSD and Linux. I know that I can check the compatability using PC BSD. But I can check it only after buying it. And if doesn't than it will be a costly blunder to me

Tell you what, I haven't even install FreeBSD-11 on a real machine. I got away from the hardware issues only because I ran FreeBSD on Virtualbox. I bought an Acer laptop mid-2016 and so far, I haven't even get on with the plan of installing it on this laptop for multiple reasons. I don't think support for modern hardware is excellent. It's okay but unfortunately not that good(at least in term of hardware for desktop use). To give you an idea of this, Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 3160 is only supported with the latest release(FreeBSD11 Oct 2016) despite having been released for couple of years already. A lot of laptop these days especially the high-end one would ship with 802.11ac capable by default and you're out of luck if it's not supported(likely).

If you're going to use built-in memory card reader, then this also may pose a problem. I can't be sure of this though but searching for things like "freebsd sd card reader" gives you the 'feel' for its support. I believe the one I have with my laptop isn't supported either. This is just my personal experience so far. I hope yours are better and smoother than mine. If everything else fails, rest assured that Linux have you covered. My laptop works out-of-box without any single tweak on Fedora 25 live-cd save for the thin sound it produces despite maxing out the master volume.

Of course you shouldn't mistake hardware support to mean that "this thing is superior to that". Most of those drivers are written by the hardware manufacturer themselves.

 

[SirDice]

I can't be sure of this though but searching for things like "freebsd sd card reader" gives you the 'feel' for its support.

Keep in mind that if you search for support questions you're bound to only find posts about things not working. People who have working hardware generally don't post support questions.

 

[scottro]

Generally,with FreeBSD, the two biggest issues are later Intel video cards, and wireless. For wireless, assuming it has a USB port that you're not using, you can buy the Edimax , about 10 dollars--ah, an Amazon link for $8.99 if you're in the US.

https://www.amazon.com/Edimax-EW-7811Un-150Mbps-Raspberry-Supports/dp/B003MTTJOY

From the description, I"m not sure if this is one of those dual video card laptops or not. If not, the NVidia card should work with the FreeBSD Nvidia drivers. (There's a post on this forum that goes through installing them, better then the somewhat outdated Handbook article.


https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/52311/

If there is an Intel card, I'm not sure how the switching works. (I'm not a gamer, so I've never dealt with the 2 video card laptops.) But, you may have to use the vesa driver with the Intel card, which will be slow.
Those are usually the things that cause problems with basic operation. I don't use bluetooth, so don't know how easy or hard it is to get working. Synaptics can also be a bit of a pain. I generally use a tiling window manager though, so that's not much of an issue for me.

 

[asys]

Keep in mind that if you search for support questions you're bound to only find posts about things not working. People who have working hardware generally don't post support questions.

There's probably some truth to this. But folks like your good self would probably come into rescue when such issues arise which is not the case in some of these complaints. It's not uncommon to see threads about unsupported hardware remain unanswered because unsupported hardware....is unsupported.

 

[arnab]

Generally,with FreeBSD, the two biggest issues are later Intel video cards, and wireless. For wireless, assuming it has a USB port that you're not using, you can buy the Edimax , about 10 dollars--ah, an Amazon link for $8.99 if you're in the US.

https://www.amazon.com/Edimax-EW-7811Un-150Mbps-Raspberry-Supports/dp/B003MTTJOY

From the description, I"m not sure if this is one of those dual video card laptops or not. If not, the NVidia card should work with the FreeBSD Nvidia drivers. (There's a post on this forum that goes through installing them, better then the somewhat outdated Handbook article.


https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/52311/

If there is an Intel card, I'm not sure how the switching works. (I'm not a gamer, so I've never dealt with the 2 video card laptops.) But, you may have to use the vesa driver with the Intel card, which will be slow.
Those are usually the things that cause problems with basic operation. I don't use bluetooth, so don't know how easy or hard it is to get working. Synaptics can also be a bit of a pain. I generally use a tiling window manager though, so that's not much of an issue for me.

Thanks for replying and sorry for my delay. This machine has an Intel HD graphics 530 and a nvidia gtx 960m. I'm also not a gamer and this will be my first dual graphics machine. I'm not sure that how much vesa driver will manage the Intel card but for nvidia one I don't need that one right now. So my question is can I use only one graphics card(Intel one) for X-org? Can I stop nvidia graphics card in freebsd session?

 

[scottro]

Speaking with no knowledge, for FreeBSD, you might actually be better off using just the NVidia one with a driver from ports if possible.

As for the Intel one, the latest info I know of is what I have on my own page about yoga2, where I needed CURRENT to work with a Haswell 4000. (That page gives the procedure, which is relatively easy, at http://srobb.net/yoga2.html, towards the bottom).
I don't know if that will be needed, and if it is, if it will work, with your card. Sorry to be of so little help.

 

[sko]

I'd have a good look at the BIOS/UEFI first - I have a ROG mainboard (maximus ranger VII) in my desktop at home and the UEFI is a bloated mess.
It takes ~30-40sec to finally hand over to the bootloader. That's slower than most of my servers, even some with multiple SAS controllers, lots of disks and lots of RAM that gets probed on boot. It gets even more annoying if you boot from a fast NVMe and the OS (TrueOS in my case) takes well under 10sec to boot, so the UEFI takes >75% of the boot time...

It also has an annoying bug that causes it to scramble the boot order when changing it, so you have to try multiple times until the desired entry is finally activated. It also seems to not purge old entries and randomly adds duplicates. I used the machine to install/boot some test systems on FC targets - even if none of them are currently connected, most of them are still listed. I currently have ~25 entries in the list of available/bootable OS while actually installed/available are 2. Due to the first bug I don't touch the boot order list until I _really really_ have to and only use the F11 boot menu...