Intel N5105 mini pc

jason.olsg

jason.olsg

Hi, first post - so please be gentle.

I'm a bit of a newbie to BSD, but have used Linux as a development desktop/laptop for a number of years.

I'm looking at the following as a workstation for some hobbyist projects:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0BN5BP683/ref=ewc_pr_img_1?smid=A1KL28GI0X8E83&psc=1

From background reading it looks as if 13.2-RELEASE should work - my requirements are HDMI to drive dual displays, Wi-Fi and a GNOME environment.

Does anyone have experience/opinions of this or something similar in this price range? CPU/thread performance isn't hugely important, and I'll spec it with 16Gb RAM, and probably install a 2Tb SSD at some point.

My only additional requirement would be to occasionally run a Win 11 VM under Virtualbox to handle some work specific productivity apps.

What's the collective opinion?
 
I have a dual display on a BeeLink U59 with an N5095. Everything on the system works, sound, video, wifi. I even tried an HDMI capture in OBS and it works perfectly. I tried a USB webcam and it works fine. So, that chip is almost the same chip I have, just newer.
 
For the Intel Celeron N5105, you will need a FreeBSD drm-kmod kernel module supporting the Jasper Lake UHD graphics.

I don't think it's available in production yet. It may be available in development. Others are likely to comment.

[I have the same issue with a Pentium Silver N6005 CPU, so will follow with interest.]
 
You mentioned desktop/development station. Give https://Ghostbsd.org/download GhostBSD-23-06-01.iso a test drive. Burn into a USB flash drive, boot the "live media" into a 4GB minimum dram memory, NO Installation necessary for just testing.
Connect to internet

pkg install hw-probe
hw-probe -all -upload a checklist of your hardware at https://bsd-hardware.info See what devices, have BSD device drivers software.

https://nomadbsd.org has that hw-probe software already included into its disk image. So no need to download from internet for local testing
https://www.youtube.com/@robonuggie channel with FreeBSD and GhostBSD videos.

Sounds like a good plan. Test with GhostBSD (based on FreeBSD sources, and modified to support easy MATE GUI desktop ) with the live media. Then install FreeBSD if that is your preference, Jason.olsg
https://t.me/ghostbsd GhostBSD telegram group https://forums.ghostbsd.org Forums for GhostBSD.org
 
Hi,

Thought I'd circle back on this topic -- my results were mixed. I was able to get 13.2 up and running, and connecting to my local wi-fi with the help of an EDIMAX wi-fi dongle. What I couldn't make work though, was getting GNOME or KDE to actually install correctly. I suspect that the integrated graphics (Intel Alder Lake-N) wasn't supported. The beta version of 14 also behaved similarly. So I went with a Debian 12 install (which works nicely, but is a bit bloated).

I'm still keen to get to a multi display FreeBSD install, so am looking at Lenovo Thinkcentre M910q - with 16Gb and an i5-6500T onboard. Does anyone have any experience of these?

Thanks in advance!
 
Are you following the handbook during initial setup? Something like dual monitor setup should work on Intel. I have converted at least 20 systems and only run into issues with the RX 6400 so far.
 
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