Looking for a good DFly/BSD laptop choice

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

Hi Jonathon McKitrick,
you wrote.


JM> Hi all,

JM> I wasn't in the market for a laptop recently, but I got a good pay review
JM> yesterday.  :-)

JM> I'd like something forward-thinking, if it isn't too expensive, but it MUST
JM> run DFly or at LEAST FreeBSD 4.x.  I was looking at a Gateway Athlon64, but
JM> I heard there are big problems with interrupt routing and BSD.

JM> I've been considering IBM ThinkPads.  What do you think?  I've heard they do
JM> well with *nix, and there's a bit of an IBM price premium, but that's all I
JM> know about them.

IBM Thinkpads have traditionally been top notch notebooks. By most
standards, they are ugly, but rather durable, work horses if you want.
Cheap they aren't, but usually you can get 25% off list price by just
asking at IBM (some creativity in asking doesn't hurt, either),
many schools even get discounts well into the 40% range
at which point the premium over Acer's etc aren't too bad anymore. I
know that Linux runs flawlessly on them (incl. WLAN, sound etc), but I
dunno about FreeBSD specifically.

I've lately seen some really nice Asus and Samsung kit, too (not
exactly cheap tho either) but there's nothing much to hear about
durability so far. Costudent of mine is running Mandrake on a Samsung,
seems to work for her.

Whatever you do, go for Centrino. Or possibly AMD Turion64 if you want
64bit, NOT for cheap desktop CPU based crapola.


Regards,
Gabriel