FreeBSD on Laptops

1 Xorg

Recent versions of Xorg work with most display adapters available on laptops these days. Acceleration may not be supported, but a generic SVGA configuration should work.

Check your laptop documentation for which card you have, and check in the Xorg documentation to see whether it is specifically supported. If it is not, use a generic device (do not go for a name which just looks similar). You can try your luck with the command Xorg -configure which auto-detects a lot of configurations.

The problem often is configuring the monitor. Common resources for Xorg focus on CRT monitors; getting a suitable modeline for an LCD display may be tricky. You may be lucky and not need to specify a modeline, or just need to specify suitable HorizSync and VertRefresh ranges. If that does not work, the best option is to check web resources devoted to configuring X on laptops (these are often Linux oriented sites but it does not matter because both systems use Xorg) and copy a modeline posted by someone for similar hardware.

Most laptops come with two buttons on their pointing devices, which is rather problematic in X (since the middle button is commonly used to paste text); you can map a simultaneous left-right click in your X configuration to a middle button click with the line

      Option "Emulate3Buttons"
   

in the xorg.conf file in the InputDevice section.

2 Modems

Laptops usually come with internal (on-board) modems. Unfortunately, this almost always means they are “winmodems” whose functionality is implemented in software, for which only Windows drivers are normally available (though a few drivers are beginning to show up for other operating systems; for example, if your modem has a Lucent LT chipset it might be supported by the comms/ltmdm port). If that is the case, you need to buy an external modem: the most compact option is probably a PC Card (PCMCIA) modem, discussed below, but serial or USB modems may be cheaper. Generally, regular modems (non-winmodems) should work fine.

3 PCMCIA (PC Card) devices

Most laptops come with PCMCIA (also called PC Card) slots; these are supported fine under FreeBSD. Look through your boot-up messages (using dmesg(8)) and see whether these were detected correctly (they should appear as pccard0, pccard1 etc on devices like pcic0).

FreeBSD 4.X supports 16-bit PCMCIA cards, and FreeBSD 5.X supports both 16-bit and 32-bit (“CardBus”) cards. A database of supported cards is in the file /etc/defaults/pccard.conf. Look through it, and preferably buy cards listed there. Cards not listed may also work as “generic” devices: in particular most modems (16-bit) should work fine, provided they are not winmodems (these do exist even as PC Cards, so watch out). If your card is recognised as a generic modem, note that the default pccard.conf file specifies a delay time of 10 seconds (to avoid freezes on certain modems); this may well be over-cautious for your modem, so you may want to play with it, reducing it or removing it totally.

Some parts of pccard.conf may need editing. Check the irq line, and be sure to remove any number already being used: in particular, if you have an on board sound card, remove irq 5 (otherwise you may experience hangs when you insert a card). Check also the available memory slots; if your card is not being detected, try changing it to one of the other allowed values (listed in the manual page pccardc(8)).

If it is not running already, start the pccardd(8) daemon. (To enable it at boot time, add

pccard_enable="YES"

There have been major changes to the pccard code (including ISA routing of interrupts, for machines where FreeBSD is not able to use the PCI BIOS) before the FreeBSD 4.4 release. If you have problems, try upgrading your system.

4 Power management

Unfortunately, this is not very reliably supported under FreeBSD. If you are lucky, some functions may work reliably; or they may not work at all.

To make things a little more complex, there are two existing standards for power management: APM and ACPI, the latter superseding the former and including more features, but also introducing more problems.

Some laptops support both APM and ACPI (to a certain degree), others just support one of them, so chances are that you have to experiment with both of them to have reliable power management on your laptop.

apm_event SUSPENDREQ {
 exec "vidcontrol -s 1 < /dev/console";
 exec "/etc/rc.suspend";
}

apm_event USERSUSPENDREQ {
 exec "vidcontrol -s 1 < /dev/console";
 exec "sync && sync && sync";
 exec "sleep 1";
 exec "apm -z";
}

apm_event NORMRESUME, STANDBYRESUME {
 exec "/etc/rc.resume";
 exec "vidcontrol -s 9 < /dev/console";
}