Re: Laptop Recommendations for NetBSD?

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>]

Hi Chris,

Chris Humphries wrote:
> Suggestions weren't mind-blowing or anything, but the usual suspects:
> Thinkpads and people saying some random laptop mostly works for them.
>
> Mostly, it seems folks don't really run NetBSD on laptops, and if they
> do they're silent about it.
> I personally suspect most people run NetBSD as on servers,
> virtualization (virtualbox or qemu), or toys like old machines/ports
> and arm boards. I'd guess a very small percentage of NetBSD users use
> it as a daily driver.

this is untrue, except the part that they are "silent" about it (as many 
things in the BSD world).
Also, recommending things for open-source is hard, do you want new ones? 
then it is an incognito, with used one, there is more testing
 involved and also the usage you intend on your laptop.
Also, mind, that sometimes the same model may have minor variations, 
like different WiFi cards

I can tell you my experience.
I run NetBSD on several "vintage" x86 ThinkPad and it runs very well and 
those machines have such a nice keyboard and screen and chassis: 
excellent for development, email... T30, T43, R41. I mostly changed hard 
disk and added RAM
- General support: excellent, stable performing
- WiFi Cards: most supported, although one ThinkPad had an unsupported 
WiFi card, I grabbed a used one
- I did not test/use BlueTooth or IRDA

Both Intel and ATI cards work reasonably well, where ATI works better, 
Intel sometimes looses acceleration and has other issues. Only very old 
nVidia cards work well with the old opensource driver. I don't recommend 
the new opensource driver even on linux, where I tried to compare it 
with the official binaries: I had worse performace, glitches, monitor 
isses...  furthermore it requires LLVM. I never tried on NetBSD and I 
might have been unlucky with the cards I tested on Linux.

A think which is unreliable or may not work is putting your laptop to 
sleep. On the above laptops only the T43 actually manages to go to sleep 
and resume "most" of the times :) Intel is an additional issue with 
sleep support.

Of course, these oldies are very good, but not for general Web browsing 
although FireFox, SeaMonkey and lately ArcticFox work on them, RAM is 
limited.
ArcticFox is very interesting there and I invest time in it.


I then also have a newer laptop (although still old) which is the HP620. 
It is a little known laptop, which performs really well with NetBSD and 
I can use it for general usage, including browsing and development.
However, while it now works (I run unstable), some things are not perfect:

- WiFi card "works" but has performance issues. Christos kindly hacked 
with me for weeks to get it working and now it is enough for casual 
usage (so much better than not working at all) but still has scan 
issues, initialization issues and it duplicates packets

For your Info: this is the "problematic" but usable wireless card:
[     1.020916] ral0 at pci2 dev 0 function 0: Ralink Technologies 
RT3090 802.11b/g/n (rev. 0x00)
[     1.020916] ral0: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 17
[     1.020916] ral0: 802.11 address e0:2a:82:5d:49:2c
[     1.020916] ral0: MAC/BBP RT3090 (rev 0x3213), RF RT3020 (MIMO 1T1R)
[     5.315662] ral0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
[     5.315662] ral0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 
12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps

- Intel Video is problematic, sometimes it looses acceleration and also 
gives issue with resume

- Resume just doesn't work :(

- the SD card reader used not to work sometimes, but I did not check 
lately, I use current kernel, so things are a bit bumpy.

Another thing which I did not test is the WebCam, since I know of no 
software on NetBSD and generally to use it. I gave up with Skype, which 
is the only thing I use it with.
The browser(s) might see it, but I did not check in recent times and 
ArcticFox doesn't support it.


Riccardo

PS: the situation I see is quite similar on other BSDs and Linux more in 
general, except
- OpenBSD put really a lot of effort in ACPI support of Laptops and 
supprots certain WiFi cards other do not, so if you are lucky, it works 
very well
. FreeBSD is comparable to NetBSD, however, it has nVidia binary 
drivers, so you can use it on more laptops
- Linux too has binaries for nVidia too, like FreeBSD and generally has 
wide support, although sleep and WiFi cards are still a matter of luck!