Will my computer be compatible with FreeBSD?

Kamey03

Kamey03

Hello everyone, I'm a linux and windows user who never tried any form of BSD before, I'd like to install BSD on my computer and try it out, possibly learn about it and its usage.
I'm wondering if my computer will be capable of running FreeBSD with a desktop environment, as I don't know if my hardware is supported.

  • GPU: AMD Rx 570 4GB 256Bit GDDR5
  • RAM: 16GB 1600 Mhz DDR3
  • CPU Intel I7-4790 4 Cores 8 Threads Base 3.60Ghz
  • Storage: 128GB Intenso SSD, 10TB WD Red Plus
  • Motherboard: Hewlett-Packard 1998
  • Display: 22" Philips 1080p
 
bsd-hardware.info

BSD Hardware Database

A database of all the hardware that works under bsd
bsd-hardware.info bsd-hardware.info

Not an extensive database but it still has a lot of hardware in it. That said, I don't expect any issues with this. Mainboard doesn't tell me much though but most mainboards should work fine. May have to figure out what kind of network interface the board has (if it has onboard networking). You could pick up a cheap Intel Pro/1000 network card if the onboard isn't supported.

And you can always boot the installation media and pick "live system", then you can check what's being detected (or not), without actually installing anything.
 
The best way to find out is to test. Looks pretty standard to me.

For graphics, Linux' DRM drivers are ported to FreeBSD. By just installing graphics/drm-kmod, you get the version recommended for your FreeBSD release (for 13, it's currently based on Linux 5.4) and all the firmwares, so if this GPU works on Linux 5.4, it most likely works on FreeBSD as well. There's also the option to test newer drivers based on Linux 5.10.
 
Hello and welcome. FreeBSD hardware support is almost the same as Linux.
The main challenge is the graphics card. My graphics card is AMD Radeon R7 370 (older than your's) and it works great.
 
Kamey03 said:
Hello everyone, I'm a linux and windows user who never tried any form of BSD before, I'd like to install BSD on my computer and try it out, possibly learn about it and its usage.
I'm wondering if my computer will be capable of running FreeBSD with a desktop environment, as I don't know if my hardware is supported.

  • GPU: AMD Rx 570 4GB 256Bit GDDR5
  • RAM: 16GB 1600 Mhz DDR3
  • CPU Intel I7-4790 4 Cores 8 Threads Base 3.60Ghz
  • Storage: 128GB Intenso SSD, 10TB WD Red Plus
  • Motherboard: Hewlett-Packard 1998
  • Display: 22" Philips 1080p
Click to expand...
I have an almost-the-same configuration with the same graphic card, an i5 45** and a pilot ah10 (I think) and it works great with Freebsd 13.1 , my DRM driver is from the official PKG latest repos.
 
Kamey03 said:
I'm wondering if my computer will be capable of running FreeBSD with a desktop environment, as I don't know if my hardware is supported.
Click to expand...

That hardware database referenced earlier is one of the most awful websites known to man, it doesn't convey information in any useful manner. Why go to the effort but produce a site so bad? So strange.

GhostBSD is a livecd style BSD, try that out and if that works then FreeBSD should be fine (not guaranteed though).
 
Kamey03 said:
I'd like to install BSD on my computer and try it out, possibly learn about it and its usage.
Click to expand...
Your Intel I7-4790 CPU has VT-x and VT-d, and you have a reasonable amount of memory, so can run an adequately resourced hypervisor.
If you just want to try FreeBSD, the easiest path is to use Hyper-V under Windows or KVM under Linux to run FreeBSD as a virtual machine.
 
Just to encourage you, I've been using FreeBSD as a desktop O/S since 1995 and have used everything from fvwm2, mwm, gnome2, gnome3, kde, lxde, xfce, metacity, even twm on as a windowing environment, finally settling on CDE (because I used CDE on DEC Alpha and Sun Solaris back in the day). I switched from Linux that year because Linux had a nasty habit of regularly trashing EXT (long before EXT2) filesystems. UFS was stable. And, FreeBSD's support for SCSI was superior to Linux at the time too.

Glad to see you making the switch. You won't be sorry. I was new to UNIX then, having just switched careers from IBM mainframe to UNIX (and being terribly disappointed with Linux 0.99.5). There were a lot of friendly FreeBSD people in 1995 to help me. I haven't looked back. It's been a great ride. The people here are as helpful as the folks were back then.
 
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