I'm using an HP Chromebook to make this post. I installed FreeBSD 13.2 Release on this machine. It wasn't actually that difficult to get FreeBSD installed. However, there are two issues. The WiFi RTL8822CE does not work. And the audio output will only output through the HDMI.
To overcome these issues I am using a USB Generation 3 hub with an Edimax (EW7811un V2) and a generic USB 2.0 audio card with headphones. The performance is amazingly great.
It only has 32GB of Nand flash storage. But I just played some Xonotic and the FPS were fantastic. This is actually a peppy machine for being a dual core.
I am using KDE5 and the there is no screen tearing which is great. Everything is very responsive on this machine and though the display is not IPS it's and the brightness seems to be a bit high by default, it's not too bad.
I was not able to get the webcam on the machine to work. UPDATE: Webcam is working. Testing in OBS Studio. I just forgot to add webcamd_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf
But a positive on this model is that it uses a PCI M.2 WiFi card. That means it can be change out for a chipset that will work under FreeBSD.
I love testing new hardware with FreeBSD.
UPDATE: I did another test with the internal wifi. It will work for a few seconds but then it stops. Any changes to the network, bringing the card up or down with ifconfig results in a system reboot. So, for now. The card is not working properly on the rtw880 driver.
UPDATE ON WIFI: WiFi is now working after following the freebsd wiki (https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Rtw88)
and adding the line
to /boot/loader.conf
To overcome these issues I am using a USB Generation 3 hub with an Edimax (EW7811un V2) and a generic USB 2.0 audio card with headphones. The performance is amazingly great.
It only has 32GB of Nand flash storage. But I just played some Xonotic and the FPS were fantastic. This is actually a peppy machine for being a dual core.I am using KDE5 and the there is no screen tearing which is great. Everything is very responsive on this machine and though the display is not IPS it's and the brightness seems to be a bit high by default, it's not too bad.
I was not able to get the webcam on the machine to work. UPDATE: Webcam is working. Testing in OBS Studio. I just forgot to add webcamd_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf
But a positive on this model is that it uses a PCI M.2 WiFi card. That means it can be change out for a chipset that will work under FreeBSD.
I love testing new hardware with FreeBSD.
UPDATE: I did another test with the internal wifi. It will work for a few seconds but then it stops. Any changes to the network, bringing the card up or down with ifconfig results in a system reboot. So, for now. The card is not working properly on the rtw880 driver.
UPDATE ON WIFI: WiFi is now working after following the freebsd wiki (https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Rtw88)
and adding the line
Code:
compat.linuxkpi.skb.mem_limit=1