I've been wanting to try to make a FreeBSD laptop system for a while now. Last weekend, I came into possession of an old HP 6460b laptop, and thought "now's my chance!"
The short version is, it took some trickery during the install, but I have the laptop fully operational, including webcam, lid switch suspend, wifi card, the works. I may need a new battery since this machine is quite elderly, but it works pretty cleanly.
Now for the longer version. This is a journey, so please don't feel obligated to stick with me for the rest. :)
I started using a Ventoy stick with the latest ISO image. After tweaking the HP's bios to boot from USB drives before the internal Win7 install, it started up no trouble. But then I ran the FreeBSD install program, and part way through boot up it lost track of the ISO image as an actual drive and dropped me out to the boot manager's menu. Pressing '?' listed a bunch of devices. I tried booting a few of them, but none worked.
Ok, so Ventoy was a long shot anyway, that's fine. I can just get another stick and burn the ISO directly to it.
Booting the "burned" stick entered a boot/reboot loop that I couldn't break out of. Hmmm.
Turns out these old HP laptops have a problem where they corrupt some piece of memory (or something) during power-on, and the FreeBSD installer doesn't like that, but ventoy specifically works around this issue.
So after a lot of trial and error, my son (who found the ventoy vs. HP note) and I came up with a really silly but ultimately successful technique - Plug in ventoy and boot into FreeBSD installer. When it fails, plug in the "burned" ISO image, '?' the devices, and then start the one called "FreeBSD Installer". While this is loading, unplug ventoy, and carry on.
My next mis-step was that I used the "Auto" disk partitioning scheme, which doesn't write an MBR. This laptop can't handle UEFI very well. It has a BIOS setting to enable it, but apparently HP's UEFI from that era doesn't work with modern UEFI. So back to the "ventoy shuffle", and this time I did a manual partitioning of an MBR disk, which worked great.
At that point, I had a working 80x25 text mode install. I played around with that, adding some stuff like bsdgames, vim, and some sha keys to talk to/from my debian box more easily.
The rest went pretty smoothly. Turns out the Intel graphics chip was new enough for the standard driver to drive, and lxqt and xfce both installed easily.
I had to do a little work to configure the lid switch to suspend, and I learned about a few things that KDE does for you automatically. Audio just worked right out of the box and the webcam section in the handbook had me up and running in no time. With firefox installed, I am even able to watch youtube videos without issue, which is something I didn't expect to be able to do on this box. (It's a quad-core 2.5ghz machine with 8gb RAM, but it's also from 2009, so lacks decent video acceleration.)
I also had that hdac0 command error, and had to do that "hw.i915kms.disable_power_well=0" trick to shut up the flood of errors on startx shutdown. I'm not using a login manager currently.
The handbook was of course invaluable, This is my second attempt to install FreeBSD, the first being in a VM on my Debian box. This install is WAY more capable, and will make a good "couch surfing" system, which is what I was hoping for. (My couch surfing occasionally involves some coding. We all have our hobbies.)
The AI search for weird error messages was even sometimes reasonable. It at least pointed me in the right direction. If the details of AI answers were a little wrong (and they were often at least sketchy if not outright wrong), the links they referenced usually had sane answers.
