FreeBSD 7 on Dell Vostro 1500

Dell had another wacky special that they were selling a 1500 for $499. Its base features were:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T5270 CPU
• NVIDIA 8400M GS Video
• CD/DVD Burner
• 2GB Ram
• 80GB HDD

Seemed like a good deal so I decided to replace my previous laptop and get one, while upgrading the screen to WSXGA+(1680x1050) and upping the HDD to 120GB.

Networking

Wired and wireless networking are supported in FreeBSD 7. Wireless was surprizingly easy to set up. Per the man page for wpi, these went in to /boot/loader.conf:

if_wpi_load="YES"
wlan_load="YES"
wlan_amrr_load="YES"
firmware_load="YES"
wpifw_load="YES"
legal.intel_wpi.license_ack=1

/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf:

network={
	ssid="something"
	proto=WPA
	key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
	pairwise=TKIP
	group=TKIP
	psk=insecurekey
	priority=2
}

rc.conf:

ifconfig_wpi0="WPA DHCP"

After this, one can just issue /etc/rc.d/netif restart or reboot.

Audio

Audio was a slight pain to get configured and took some messing around. This laptop uses the snd_hda driver which is an implimtation from Sigmantel. dmesg shows:

pcm0: [ITHREAD]
pcm0: <HDA Codec: Sigmatel (Unknown)>
pcm0: <HDA Driver Revision: 20071129_0050>

and `cat /dev/sndstat` shows:

FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm: 32bit 2007061600/i386)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <Intel 82801H High Definition Audio Controller> at memory 0xfebfc000 irq 21 \
    kld snd_hda [20071129_0050] [MPSAFE]  (1p:2v/1r:1v channels duplex default)

The fix, in my situation, was to add this to /boot/device.hints:

hint.pcm.0.config="gpio0"

Audio is still not perfect, but it works.

Xorg

The binary Xorg packages with FreeBSD 7 worked great. It appears that since xorg 7.3, you don't even need an xorg conf to get it running as a test, so 'startx' simply brings you in to it. I'm a KDE user, so I installed those packages as well. pkg_add -r kde does the trick, even though its super bloated. You will want an xorg.conf however, and you can easily create one per the instructions with:

Xorg -config xorg.conf

Video

I installed the x11/nvidia-driver, changed the driver to "nvidia" in xorg.conf and it worked the first time. You do need to add this to /boot/loader.conf to load the module:

nvidia_load="YES"

Nothing special was needed to make 1680x1050 work, as it worked at the correct resolution and apsect with my generated xorg.conf. You can probably trim it down a bit to only the color depth you want to make your config easier to read.

Synaptics Touchpad

While the touch pad will work with basic functionality, to enable features such as scrolling, a few things need to happen. Please this line in /boot/loader.conf:

hw.psm.synaptics_support=1

Then install x11-drivers/synaptics and note its sample config once installed. It was necessary to add the AllowEmptyInput portion, and tweak your InputDevice to change speed, scrolling, area, etc like so:

Section "ServerLayout"
	#InputDevice	"OldMouseLine"	"CorePointer"
	InputDevice	"Synaptics_Touchpad"	"CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
	Option		"AllowEmptyInput"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier      "Synaptics_Touchpad"
	Driver		"synaptics"
	Option		"Device"	"/dev/psm0"
	Option		"Protocol"	"psm"
EndSection

ACPI

This is the only thing I cannot get working properly. ACPI seems to be detected, but it will not properly trigger S3, which is suspend to ram. One can attempt to manually invoke this with:

acpiconf -s 3

but it fails. I attempted to enable debugging in acpi.ko per the ACPI docs but all that did was make my system unbootable, even with ACPI disabled. To get things working again, I had to use the Frenzy Rescue CD, which worked great.