FreeBSD-6 fails to install on too many old laptops.

FreeBSD has progressively broken support for 5 of my older
laptops.
One needs massive time reading manuals etc, only then to
fail anyway,
getting beyond 4.11.  (Only 1 modern here takes 6.2).

4.11 is nominally dead, yet on many older laptops is all
that Works.
Newcomers may give up after 6.2 & dump FreeBSD, not
knowing to use 4.11
with working { ATA access, Geom / FDISK, PCMCIA (ether &
cdrom), PLIP }.

Developers may use newer laptops or towers, but support for
older
laptops should not be So damaged as now, many older laptop
are still
fine as office X terminals, UPS/PBX status monitors etc.

Suggestion: A collosal slow_and_safe option in loader.conf
(like a
BIOS has), so at least one can install, then until it's
turned off,
a grep at boot to mail root reporting machine was
deliberately
slowed to ensure install. Then installer can disable 
slow_and_safe
and debug- edit on a working platform, not repetitively do 5
floppy
installs typing screeds of "set" magic hopefully
to loader.

I'm analysing broken-ness since 4.11, & doc'ing it
here:
http://berk
lix.org/~jhs/hardware/laptops/ Inc. URL to PLIP failure
(where I hope to later try back porting 4.11 PLIP src to
6.2).

Julian
- -- 
Julian Stacey. Munich Computer Consultant, BSD Unix C Linux.
http://berklix.com
 HTML mail unseen. Ihr Rauch=mein allergischer Kopfschmerz.
Dump cigs 4 snuff.

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Am 12.06.2007 um 22:29 schrieb Julian H. Stacey:

> FreeBSD has progressively broken support for 5 of my
older laptops.
> One needs massive time reading manuals etc, only then
to fail anyway,
> getting beyond 4.11.  (Only 1 modern here takes 6.2).


I can confirm this for my parents' (formerly owned by my
brother)  
Mitac Mi-Note 6020.
It works with 4.10, but wouldn't boot 5 or 6 or even the
7-snapshot I  
once tried.
I may try with the June snapshots (but how do you backup a
computer  
whose only network connection is an 11MBit wireless card?).

This is a Celeron 366 with 320 or so MB RAM.
It just panics during probing.
The reason I didn't report this is that
a) it currently works (running StarOffice 7 on KDE)
b) it's physically so broken (all hinges are so hard to
open/close  
that they are broken out of the case on all sides - the
thing is  
sitting in a wooden frame that my father built 
c) I also run FreeBSD on servers. I'd rather like developers
to spend  
their limited time on getting it to work better on the
latest server- 
hardware and on newer laptops (which are arriving every
quarter)


>
> 4.11 is nominally dead, yet on many older laptops is
all that Works.


Personally, I suspect really bad ACPI-implementations as the
reason  
for the kernel-panics I get (no success with safe-mode, ACPI
or no  
ACPI).

And 4.x _is_ dead. Not only nominally, but really. No fixes.
Ports  
don't build. End of game. RIP.
(I've got a server with 4.11 in a colo 500 km away that is
waiting  
for a 'decision')


> Newcomers may give up after 6.2 & dump FreeBSD, not
knowing to use  
> 4.11
> with working { ATA access, Geom / FDISK, PCMCIA (ether
& cdrom),  
> PLIP }.
>


Newcomers today will either have one of those 600 Euro
el-cheapo  
laptops from one of the big electronic-supermarket-chains,
or will  
have had the sense to buy at least a Pentium3-Mobile-class
system on  
ebay (can be had very cheaply, usually works like built for
FreeBSD).

The other old laptop I own (a Dell Inspiron 4000, Celeron
800 with  
512 MB RAM) runs 6.x almost as fast as my Pentium-M 1.6 with
1GB RAM.

So to conclude: I'm all for supporting slow hardware (WRAP,
Soekris -  
you name it) - but when we talk about hardware that was
"new" seven  
or more years ago (and with most problems probably caused by
BIOS- 
bugs), I can also support drawing a final stroke.




cheers,
Rainer
-- 
Rainer Duffner
CISSP, LPI, MCSE
rainerultra-secure.de


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