As mentioned in the previous post, I installed FreeBSD on an HP Compaq 6710b. Previously, I had Ubuntu 8.04 installed.

Booting the ISO Image

First of all, I had to choose how to install. My preferred way of installing FreeBSD and Linux is to boot from a minimal CD and then get the packages (or whatever they are called for the system at hand) via network. The 6710b is an Intel 64 bit architecture. Hence, I assumed that ia64 is the right platform, but it is not. After reading the release notes, it was clear to me, that the correct platform is (counter intuitively) amd64. So I started my download of 7.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso and booted the ISO.

The installation went quite smooth. I choose to have a 1GB root partition and 4GB swap partition and have the rest for a ZFS partition. See the post on ZFS on FreeBSD for the details.

WLAN

The 6710b has a Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG device. There is a project to get the 3945ABG WLAN device to work under FreeBSD, and now it is available in 8.0-Current and RELENG_7. I had a little trouble to get the device to work. The reason was that you need to accept the license for the firmware. To do so you need the following line in your /boot/loader.conf in order to state that you accept the license:

legal.intel_wpi.license_ack=1

Setting it via kenv and unloading and loading the module if_wpi did not help. I did not want to try every module, so I did a reboot. After that, the device worked, but there are still two strange problems: 1) I need to scan for WLANs, before the device connects to the configured WLAN. I also witnessed this problem under Ubuntu every now and then, but under FreeBSD it is reproducible. 2) Sometimes I loose the connection. After that I have to unload and load the if_wpi module.

X and DRI

I installed the port x11/xorg and configured it with X -configure. DRI was not working, even though the agp module was loaded and detected the Intel Mobile GM965/GL960 card correctly. 3D acceleration is not so important for me, but an X without 2D acceleration is unusable these days. Unfortunately, X made strange rendering errors that would only go away when I set the NoAccel option in the device section to true.

After trying several things I decided to grab the FreeBSD sources of RELENG_7 via the following command and compile my own kernel.

# csup -h cvsup2.de.freebsd.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile

I basically simply compiled a new kernel using the GENERIC configuration file and installed it with the modules. After that DRI worked and the rendering problems were gone.

Suspend to RAM

To make it short: it does not work. I was expecting this, because I never had luck to get it to work under FreeBSD on a HP Compaq nx7010. The problem seems to be that HP Bioses are a bit, well, different than one normally expects.

Other Hardware

The LAN device just works. USB is no problem, either (checked with USB mouse and memory stick). I don't care about blue-tooth. CPU speed-stepping and SMP seems to work, but I did not take a close look.

Links

• TuxMobil has or links reports and HowTos for Linux and *BSD on different (mobile) Hardware