# Is MSI GS77 Stealth 12UGS supported ?



## Silence (Dec 4, 2022)

Hello,

I'm new here on the forums. I'm rather new with FreeBSD either (few experience within VMs). And I have 20+ years of experience with Linux (mostly with Debian).
I'm considering moving my computers from Debian to Linux.

I bought a quite recent laptop: an MSI GS77 Stealth 12UGS. I have found no relevant information about its support on FreeBSD. I checked both the wiki list (which seems outdated) and the compatibility list here on this forum but without success.

I'm just hoping that someone had successfully installed and ran FreeBSD on this laptop or similar.

In case it can be useful, some of the specs could be found here: https://www.msi.com/Laptop/Stealth-GS77-12UX/Specification (I know information is not detailed).

Thanks.


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## SirDice (Dec 5, 2022)

You can just boot the install media, drop to a shell and check what's being detected and what not.


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## elgrande (Dec 5, 2022)

I assume most of the stuff would work out of the box.
LAN may be tricky and require a manual patch of the driver depending on which Killer model it uses. WiFi might work out of the box.
If you have problems getting LAN to work, you can ping me here, maybe I can help.


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## Profighost (Dec 5, 2022)

Laptops are always a bit tricky, since they are one config consisting a buttload of fixed, unchangeable hardware-devices,
which again depend on wheter there are drivers for or not.
(I'm sure you already knew that -I just want to have it added for possible other readers.)

The FreeBSD Wiki offers a lot of further information, such as Laptops

The authors specifically ask to gather information:
"






*Note:* This table is maintained manually; it does not include some laptop models we have information about -- feel free to add them.  For the full list of laptops in this wiki, see the category search page.






 Please, use the template for laptop wiki pages if you wish add a new machine.
"


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## Alain De Vos (Dec 5, 2022)

Normally you can issue,

```
/usr/sbin/pciconf -lv
```


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## Silence (Dec 6, 2022)

Thank you all for the answers. This is much appreciated.



SirDice said:


> You can just boot the install media, drop to a shell and check what's being detected and what not.



This is a great idea. How far detected means completely supported ? I mean I seldom have detected hardware on Linux, but unusable. I faced that for some LAN, USBs, or sound cards. They were listed and recognized but didn't worked (there were various reasons why they didn't worked though).



elgrande said:


> LAN may be tricky and require a manual patch of the driver depending on which Killer model it uses. WiFi might work out of the box.



This might be annoying for LAN. That will also be the case for FreeBSD 13.1 ? Wouldn't it be preferable to wait for 13.2 ?



Alain De Vos said:


> Normally you can issue,
> 
> ```
> /usr/sbin/pciconf -lv
> ```



This will be useful. Great.

And for the little story, I bought an Asus Rog several years ago, just when it was released. I installed Debian on it and 2 weeks after, it literally burnt in front of my face. No one knows if the hardware was defected (most likely) or if there were some issues with the kernel code (it was on top of the first AMD Ryzen, which was known to have bugs with idling and freezes). But this is something I would prefer to avoid.


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## SirDice (Dec 6, 2022)

Silence said:


> How far detected means completely supported ? I mean I seldom have detected hardware on Linux, but unusable. I faced that for some LAN, USBs, or sound cards. They were listed and recognized but didn't worked (there were various reasons why they didn't worked though).


That might happen. In another thread we've had some issues with alc(4) for example. Card is detected and can be configured but doesn't actually work. But you could test this with the install media, just configure the network interface (ifconfig(8), dhclient(8)) and see if it actually works, testing could be done with ping(8) and/or fetch(1).



Alain De Vos said:


> Normally you can issue,
> 
> ```
> /usr/sbin/pciconf -lv
> ```


This enumerates whatever is on the PCI(e) bus through ACPI. Doesn't necessarily mean there's a driver attached to it, or needs to be. It will provide a nice list of the hardware that's in the machine.



Silence said:


> That will also be the case for FreeBSD 13.1 ? Wouldn't it be preferable to wait for 13.2 ?


Don't have to wait. You could update 13.1-RELEASE to 13-STABLE (or do the install with a recent -STABLE snapshot). Although I'm not sure if this specific patch has been MFC'ed to -STABLE yet. The 'downside' of running -STABLE is that you can only do source updates/upgrades. So you'll need to build from source (that's actually quite an easy process, it just takes time to build everything). This is only for the base OS, you can still use packages for the rest.


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## elgrande (Dec 6, 2022)

Silence said:


> This might be annoying for LAN. That will also be the case for FreeBSD 13.1 ? Wouldn't it be preferable to wait for 13.2 ?



Which exact Killer model do you have?
Mine requires a driver from ports, so waiting for 13.2 or using -STABLE would not help here. The patch though is only one line, not a big issue.


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