Monday, January 26, 2009

FreeBSD/mips: what's cooking

In last two months I've got two new toys: WGT634U from bms@ and Ubiquity Networks' Router Station 2 provided by manufacturer. The first one is Broadcom's Sentry5 based and the second one is built on Atheros' AR7100 chip. As AR7100 is more advanced technology (and has less obscure design, at least it seams less obscure to me) I decided to pick up this low hanging fruit. So far so good: kernel boots, PCI bridge detects Atheros miniPCI wireless card. GigE driver is on its way.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Thinkpad T400 and FreeBSD

Finally I got my hands on new and shiny Lenovo Thinkpad T400. What can I say? It's cool. My only complaint about T60 was its somewhat dim display (yes, I tried to save some money on this vital part and got punished). This time I ordered model with LED backlight and it's worth every dime spent :)

My configuration also included Atheros wifi, built-in bluetooth, Intel GMA X4500 graphics (I'm not in games, really). Unfortunately 7.1 was able to run wifi. Newer HAL did the trick though and here I am: eating my own dog food - running -CURRENT on a workhorse.

Intel graphics was kind of disappointment. I expected no problems with this integrated chipset but there were a lot. "Ghost" video output (or companion display) that was causing mplayer not to run in fullscreen mode (fixed with xrandr). With SWCursor option off text console is garbled when switching to it from X. mplayer is somewhat laggish in full screen mode :( I hope intel driver will be updated soon, meanwhile I'll refrain from watching movies (it should boost my productivity :))

UPD: It seems that Intel Video artifacts is due to unsymmetrical memory layout (I have 2G + 1G). Windows 7 is affected as well.