Compaq Presario 900US laptop and FreeBSD 5.0

For the impatient, here is my main FreeBSD 5.0 config files: XF86Config, dmesg.

Here is the stuff that does work:

1. Video Card - ATI Radeon Mobility (U1)
   • Detected as: "ATI model 4336 graphics accelerator" by dmesg
   • Runs at 1024x768@24bit in Xfree86 4.3.0 with 'vesa' driver
   • No accellerated support with the 'radeon' driver yet
   • Also known as ChipID 0x4336, Radeon IGP, Radeon 7000, Radeon U1
2. Network Card - (RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX) (rl0)
   • Detected as "RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX" by dmesg
3. Sound Card - (Acer Labs M5451)
   • Does work fine, changed flags: hw.snd.pcm0.vchans=2, hw.snd.maxautochans=2 (/etc/sysctl.conf)
   • Did add "device pcm" to kernel config
4. CDRW/DVDROM - Toshiba SD-R2102 (/dev/acd0)
   • burncd works for burning cdr/cdrw, erasing cdrw
   • mount_cd9660 /dev/acd0c /cdrom
5. Floppy Drive - (NEC 72065B or clone) (/dev/fd0)
   • mount_msdos /dev/fd0c /floppy
   • install mtools for quick and dirty copying (mcopy, mdel, mdir, mmd, etc.)
6. TouchPad - Synaptics Touchpad
   • If you setup the mouse correctly during install (PS/2) then the Touchpad will work along with any usb mice on the same /dev/sysmouse Check XF86Config for more info.
7. External VGA port
   • Works out of the box, this port is automatically enabled unless it is turned off by the OS. Since FreeBSD doesn't turn it off it is always on if you need to hook an external monitor into the port.

Now the things that do not work

1. Power Managment - FreeBSD 5.0 hangs on boot when the ACPI is enabled, so this still doesn't work.
2. Quick-keys for 'Internet,' 'Mail,' 'Search,' 'Music,' 'Volumn' -- Of course the Windows key doesn't do anything either, but nobody is complaining about that.
3. S-Video port - Currently the video card works via the VESA driver, this VESA driver doesn't know howto enable or disable the S-Video port and hence it does not work.
4. Sony Digital Camera P1, USB - Is detected, but summarily locked the computer and had to hard reset it.
5. PCMCIA/PC Card slot
   • cbb0: at device 10.0 on pci0
   • cardbus0: on cbb0
   • pccard0: <16-bit PCCard bus> on cbb0
   • cbb: Unable to map IRQ...
   • device_probe_and_attach: cbb0 attach returned 12

I have yet to play with the following hardware to either confirm or deny functionality.

1. Infrared port
2. Modem
3. Firewire/IEE1394

Click Here for my dmesg results. This is with the latest CVS release of FreeBSD 5.0 (as of 3/28/2003)

Installation notes:

After downloading the 5.0 CD's I tried to boot up. The system will halt during bootup. This is caused by the ACPI which is not quite supported correctly. You will need to stop the boot process before it loads the kernel and type "set hint.acpi.0.disabled=1" and then "boot" to continue the process.

Follow the install to get the system installed, make sure that when you reboot the system after the install that you follow the booting procedure above. I added this line 'hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"' to my /boot/device.hints so I didn't have to type it in any longer.

First file to update you system is the cvsup console based updater. Next is a supfile to update the stable source tree, and then a supfile to update the ports tree.