laptop hardware

N

nedry

Hello I would very much like to run FreeBSD 11 on a 64 bit laptop, including wifi etc. Is there a particular model you would recommend? I was thinking of getting a DELL second hand off ebay. Has anyone got recommendations?
thanks
nedry
 
Sleezy business practices aside, Lenovo ThinkPads are often well supported. I'm running an X220 and everything works (wifi, suspend/resume, brightness control, reasonable battery life). I see X220s on EBay for around $200. If you want something larger, I know the T540 is also well supported.

Bonus: CoreBoot is supported on the X220, and there has been some recent work to chip away at the ME (https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2016-November/082331.html).
 
I can vouch for the Dell Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge Lattitudes. E6220,E6320,E6420,E6330,E6430.
Bluetooth is the only thing I have not had working.
Avoid any of the NVidia embedded models. Many times you want to look at the Dell service tag and run it through Dell support and check inventory of the machine. The NVidia versions run hot and battery life is bad. On the regular models about 7-8 hours with some tuning.
The illuminated keyboard is the shiznik.
Even on models without backlit keyboard you can add them. All the connectors are there and the bios picks them up.
I have swapped processors, ram, add cellular modems and SSD. They ship with Intel cards which are 3X mimo.
The expansion bay is quite handy as I use hard drive bay or dvd drive depending on need.
My only bad words are sound. The sound is not the loudest and crackles when jacked up. They used some puny sized amp onboard.
There are 3 mPCIe slots with 2 half sized, one with wifi, and one full sized mPCIe slot for the cellular modem. All models ship with a SIM slot. Parts on ebay are abundant.
 
Lenovo P50 - just works. Graphics, Wifi, etc (You have to load if_iwm and nvidia-modeset throught kld_list in /etc/rc.conf). Even suspend/resume works. I currently have a problem with a blank console when switching from X11 to a TTY. But you won't notice this, if you mainly use X11
 
mrmarbury:
Do you have an older vty set? Did you try setting "kern.vty=vt" in /boot/loader.conf?

I had a Lenovo T430, which worked great with FreeBSD. I now have a x260, which is s decent machine, but too new for FreeBSD (intel driver does not work - fallback to framebuffer driver works, wlan works, backlight control does not work, boot only via UEFI possible, didn't try suspend yet).
 
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