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Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

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Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#31

Post by superuser2 »

jrgifford wrote: post #20
superuser2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX is very good at not having hardware compatibility issues, and you don't need to interact with it very much to open VirtualBox. While this is not the most performant option (OSX idles with a good chunk of RAM), it is probably the easiest and most reliable path to not worrying about hardware compatibility, drivers, etc.

"OS X is very good at not having hardware compatibility issues" is a really, really old (and flawed) argument. The thing that makes OS X so darn "stable" is that they write drivers for a very limited set of hardware - the reference implementation. On the Linux reference implementation, everything works properly (See the ThinkPad T series). On the Windows reference implementation, everything works properly (See the Su…

>Simply because something works when it's built for a piece of hardware (think embedded systems) doesn't mean that it will work when running on something that it wasn't designed for.

No one is advocating doing that. And no one gives a shit about how hard it was for the engineers.

You should buy a Macbook precisely because it is a reference implementation that works as a consumer product. Let OSX deal with laptop-y details like WiFi, screen brightness, battery/power management, suspend/resume, and device drivers. Let VirtualBox abstract away those details so FreeBSD behaves like it does on its reference implementation - server hardware.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#32

Post by NhanH »

thmzlt wrote: post #27

I got a Thinkpad X230 for the exact same purpose. It doesn't have the nice screen but takes two SSDs and 16GB of RAM. I installed FreeBSD on it last night and apparently everything was detected and seems to be working fine. The FreeBSD wiki has a Laptops page: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops

Sadly, the Thinkpad X230 seems to be replaced by the newer X240 now. Any idea if it's working just as well? I probably can still get a refurbished X230 somewhere, but the screen is a bit too bad :(.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#33

Post by NhanH »

cperciva wrote: post #12

I have been running FreeBSD on laptops since 2004. Right now the major problem you'll run into is that almost every system out there has Haswell video, and FreeBSD doesn't have a working driver for that yet. That said, there have been a lot of commits recently preparing the tree for importing a version of the linux Haswell driver, so I'm optimistic that this will be fixed soon. In the mean time, unless your need for…

Out of curiosity, which laptop are you using right now?

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#34

Post by NhanH »

davidw wrote: post #4

If this is as open as claimed, it should be easy to get FreeBSD running on it in short order: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop Downvoters - care to explain? Open hardware means it will work for everyone, which is pretty cool in my book.

I looked into the laptop just last week too! But open hardware just mean that we still need some FreeBSD developers to be using it and port the linux drivers (they only make sure that it would be working on stock with linux drivers). From the web page:

> Since we are using Trisquel GNU/Linux, which is the strictest of distributions and strips all binary blobs from the Linux kernel, you can easily install anything less strict, such as Debian and Ubuntu. We have not yet tried installing a non-GNU/Linux-based operating system.

Considering that there won't be a big group of developers using the Librem laptop to start with, I was afraid some of the driver might be missing.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#35

Post by ion201 »

davidw wrote: post #4

If this is as open as claimed, it should be easy to get FreeBSD running on it in short order: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop Downvoters - care to explain? Open hardware means it will work for everyone, which is pretty cool in my book.

> Open hardware

Nope. Its i7 cpu is definitely not what I would consider open hardware. So then what's the point of this? If there's nothing 'libre' about most of the hardware inside then it's just a normal i7 laptop with Linux pre-installed. I don't see how this is any different than just buying a laptop and immediately replacing everything on it with OSS.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#36

Post by tiffanyh »

cperciva wrote: post #12

I have been running FreeBSD on laptops since 2004. Right now the major problem you'll run into is that almost every system out there has Haswell video, and FreeBSD doesn't have a working driver for that yet. That said, there have been a lot of commits recently preparing the tree for importing a version of the linux Haswell driver, so I'm optimistic that this will be fixed soon. In the mean time, unless your need for…

>> "there have been a lot of commits recently preparing the tree for importing a version of the linux Haswell driver"

Not meaning to start a license flame war, but how does this work?

How does FreeBSD import something that's presumably GPL'ed?

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#37

Post by cperciva »

NhanH wrote: post #33
cperciva wrote: post #12

I have been running FreeBSD on laptops since 2004. Right now the major problem you'll run into is that almost every system out there has Haswell video, and FreeBSD doesn't have a working driver for that yet. That said, there have been a lot of commits recently preparing the tree for importing a version of the linux Haswell driver, so I'm optimistic that this will be fixed soon. In the mean time, unless your need for…

Out of curiosity, which laptop are you using right now?

I'm on a Latitude E5420 right now, but I bought an E7440 last year which I've been using for testing and plan on switching over to as soon as Haswell support is available.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#38

Post by LnxPrgr3 »

davidw wrote: post #4

If this is as open as claimed, it should be easy to get FreeBSD running on it in short order: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop Downvoters - care to explain? Open hardware means it will work for everyone, which is pretty cool in my book.

Not a downvoter, but I read the link, including this claim: "4 Core (8 Threads) 3.4GHz Intel i7-4770HQ"

I thought that sounded fishy: http://ark.intel.com/products/83505/Intel-Core-i7-4770HQ-Pro...

It's a 3.4GHz chip if you tie three cores behind its back—otherwise it's 2.2GHz (either that, or they've worked some serious magic). That puts it roughly in MBP territory, only with lower resolution, less RAM, and slower storage. Making them more comparable brings the price up to $2559, with early bird pricing… and of course no guarantee FreeBSD can actually run on it, since it's designed around Linux.

Some people might find the higher price worthwhile for a setup that eliminates almost all closed-source code. If that's not something OP's after, that's one hell of a steep price tag.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#39

Post by wampus »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #23

Depends on how you intend to use it. In my scenario I initially planned to dual-boot FBSD/Windows 8.1 but found a different solution. In January 2014 I acquired a MS Surface Pro 2. Display is 1920x1080, and it has 8G ram/245G SSD. A problem dual booting is FBSD didn't do Secure Boot, which meant a hassle switching back into Win8.1. SB would have to be disabled to install/run FBSD, and Win8.1 wants SB to be enabled. H…

Upon reading your post, it strikes me how archaic it seems to install any OS these days. It would be awesome if every OS was available as a base VM image that worked out of the box (networking, video, audio, etc.), ready to enhance and customize. I wouldn't even want a host OS beyond what is needed to manage the hypervisor.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#40

Post by serf »

NhanH wrote: post #32
thmzlt wrote: post #27

I got a Thinkpad X230 for the exact same purpose. It doesn't have the nice screen but takes two SSDs and 16GB of RAM. I installed FreeBSD on it last night and apparently everything was detected and seems to be working fine. The FreeBSD wiki has a Laptops page: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops

Sadly, the Thinkpad X230 seems to be replaced by the newer X240 now. Any idea if it's working just as well? I probably can still get a refurbished X230 somewhere, but the screen is a bit too bad :(.

X series laptops have historically had a lot of screen options to choose from if one wishes to upgrade. I have a X201s with an IPS from the tablet version I swapped in. 400+ nit outdoor panel, couldn't be happier with it.
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