Re: Laptop Recommendations for NetBSD?

[Chavdar Ivanov <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost>]

Another fairly regular and reasonably happy NetBSD laptop user here.
HP Envy 17" 2016 vintage with Intel 530 graphics and NVidia GeForce
950M, latter detected, but unsuported. Intel DRM accelerated graphics
now works very well, with only a few disappearing horizontal streaks
with gdm and kdm (xdm now looks perfect). 3D acceleration, full screen
video all work well, there are no problems with the Wifi (very
reliable, I do all my upgrades from another system on my LAN via it,
also use pkgin over it). Sound is working as expected. The
installation of NetBSD is on a GPT labeled disk and uses UEFI,
performed following the abovementioned link - basically, I added a
second disk to the laptop, converted it under Windows 10 to GPT, then
initially installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on it, added some partition as
add-on for Windows, then installed RedHat 7.4, after which, having
some 100GB leftover,  I decided to try the UEFI NetBSD installation (I
always use -current of the moment and update using sysupgrade 2-3
times a week). Initially I had to disable nouveau, as it caused a
panic during boot; later this problem was solved.  At some stage I
installed rEFInd to get the nice OS graphics choice screens; with the
EFI version of the time it was possible to choose a default .efi file
to boot from; later I upgraded the laptoip to the latest version of
the EFI (F.51), this default option was lost, so now I have to choose
which efi file to boot after hitting F9, which is a bit of a pain, as
I have to traverse through the EFI hierarchy (there are four EFI
partitions altogether... ).

Overall, as long as it is not the latest and greatest, there is a
reasonably good chance to get NetBSD running on a wide range of
devices, as we know well. I've had several attempts to get FreeBSD (of
different versions and distributions) and OpenBSD on this laptop, but
there were always problems (I had Trident on an external USB3 disk for
a while, an upgrade rendered it unusable; OpenBSD didn't like the
hardware as well). I use at present Firefox 67.04, although midori and
epiphany are also available and working reasonably well. There is also
an older HP Elite laptop with broken glass and non functioning FireGL
graphics, setup as a development server for NetBSD-current, which also
works well; this is also used for virtualisation via qemu-nvmm and vnc
display.

Chavdar

On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 11:49, Riccardo Mottola
<riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> David Brownlee wrote:
> > I'm another NetBSD ThinkPad user - T530 which is supported quite well.
> > My main use is IntelliJ IDEA java development.
> > My main gripe would be Firefox crashing on trying to load some sites
> > (eg maps.google.com) :/
>
> this is a little bit off-topic: does the crash happen also on a
> Workstation? I suppose it is a more general Firefox issue and even more
> broadly: browser support which coes beyond Chrome on Windows or Linux.
> Only Firefox is left and there too, things are less optimal beyond the
> "major" OS.
>
> ArcticFox loads maps.google.com but also openstreetmaps :)
>
> Riccardo



-- 
----