Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#51

Post by brudgers » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 4:11 AM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #11

octix wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be a shock to you, but not everyone loves Mac OS X. There are (imagine that) other OSs that have terminals too. Oh snap! I must've stroke a chord. What did I say? I mean, he asks how to grill a steak, but some suggest how to cook brats.

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.

Running a virtualized instance of BSD does not point toward or away from any particular host OS or piece of laptop hardware. Virtualization brings all brands and Operating Systems into the mix.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#52

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 7:45 AM UTC

ion201 wrote: post #35

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#53

Post by davidw » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 7:47 AM UTC

ion201 wrote: post #35

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.

It's "open" in the sense of specs and lack of proprietary blobs, which is probably a good start at getting FreeBSD running there, which is what the question was all about, rather than having a purer-than-thou system.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#54

Post by feld » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 8:29 PM UTC

tiffanyh wrote: post #36

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?

The Intel graphics driver code in Linux uses a license which is BSD compatible.

Look at all the files here to see the license in the header:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr...

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#55

Post by b1twise » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 9:16 PM UTC

I'm not exactly on topic, but I hope you can forgive me touting my own project. I'm trying to raise money to fund the work necessary to get OpenBSD running on Apple hardware. One can buy an Apple laptop with cash in any mid-sized mall around the world. Add in what I think is the most privacy oriented operating system, and you have a great match. Apple only updates hardware a couple of times a year, and its pretty well built. https://www.reddit.com/r/LighthouseProjects/comments/2ukg1u/...