George - TrueOS

Hi guys,

I am a long term listener of the show and have met you at some EuroBSD
conferences in the past.

I am already well on my way converting to BSD land of things from Linux
having converted all my network and server machines to a BSD OS,
but like most (I think) I am still struggling with client machines in
the form of laptops where I have found Ubuntu Linux to let me use most
of the daily peripherals like printers/scanners/cameras SDCards,
attending an online conference or doing an interview etc. etc. to be
less painless and more close to the main stream Windows and Macintosh
machines. Yes I did try bleeding edge releases of PC-BSD in the past
but probably that did not work because of the vast variety of hardware
and some peculiarities in the same model and those combinations in my
laptop in particular.

Anyway I am writing to say that the latest version of TrueOS is
actually very-very close to having me replace Ubuntu on my laptop. What
I mean is it works the screen resolution is what I get Linux or Windows
the hplip functions as expected, email, etc is all standard, sounds
seems to work as well, Lumina seems nice too, and I just have to
say ...WOW... Kudos to Kris and the team for their excellent work over
the years and especially for this latest incarnation of FreeBSD for the
desktop/laptop. I especially like the fact that you are now going to be
following the bleeding edge stuff on the tree and one will get quicker
access to new features and hardware. I have to also mention
documentation here as well because the first time I opened that on a
PC-BSD 9.x I felt weird... what I mean is I did not expect to find
anything that good and detailed for something I downloaded for free
from the web .... past experience I guess , so I felt like I stole
something maybe and there will certainly be a pop-up or two to start
making donations NOW .

We, people in IT, spend a lot of time talking about all kinds of issues
and important concerns like: security, performance, data integrity,
throughput, ability to configure/modify your system etc. etc. but one
thing trumps them all when you need a computer to do something you
pretty much care only about _that_ and the rest of it takes second
place. This is where I think Kris's efforts and quite naturally the
efforts of all people working on FreeBSD the other BSDs and open source
really help, but the proper packaging become critical to the
adoption/growth and long term viability of a technology. Ubuntu is very
good at that and I am happy to see BSD land has its player too.

If I can now have my full toolchain on my favorite OS with the
virtualization capabilities etc. I am able to experience a lot of the
issues and possibilities first hand and build a more intimate
relationship .... hehe that sound weird ... with the OS. What I mean by
that is people trust what they run and are used to fixing on a daily
basis the most.

Now to my question:

My laptop is a Lenovo x140e with an AMD processor and an ATI graphics
card, for the WIFI I use a USB adapter as the default one does not work.

So my problem is that when I hookup my larger 23" Samsung monitor with
a 1920x1080 resolution I can only get 1024x768 max on it. Needless to
say that is not ideal. I can see some errors in the dmesg, included
below, that may indicate whether the issue lies but I am not exactly
sure how to decipher those and whether playing with X or xrandr
configuration would have an effect, xrandr modelines was not successful
so far, and let me increase the maximum size for the device.

Also as a general question something that I struggle with when let's
say I look online and try to find a replacement wireless NIC that would
be supported by FreeBSD what are the steps or process I should take.

What've concluded so far is that resellers would publish some general
information like the version number and speed support but may not have
a revision number or any other technical details from that I can go to
Intel/etc. and try to get the specs for the devices and possible a few
of its revisions. Then I can try to browse the source code and read the
man pages to figure out what are my chances, but this last part is
where it gets uncomfortable  it feels like a lottery draw.

Anyway if you can share how you do that for your machines that would be
great i.e. pick hardware.