# Workstation recommendations



## msbic (Oct 24, 2014)

Good day all,

I am looking to get myself a workstation for dual booting Windows and FreeBSD. Being lazy lately, I am leaning towards buying a name brand machine as opposed to building one from parts. It will be used for hobby programming, some document editing, no games (so I don't care much for an expensive video card).

My question, is which brands/series can run FreeBSD more or less trouble free? Also, how well does the FreeBSD installer handle UEFI, I've never installed it on modern machines.

Thanks in advance!


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## wblock@ (Oct 24, 2014)

In general, FreeBSD should run fine on any standard machine.  Very recent hardware, like Haswell CPUs or AMD APUs, is only partly supported at present.  I have not tried the installer with UEFI yet.  Machines with UEFI should still allow booting from "legacy" media, but dual-booting is likely to make that much more complicated.  As usual, I suggest considering running one of the operating systems as a VM host and the other as a VM guest.  This is easier and safer to set up and allows running both at the same time.

If you have a specific model being considered, post it and we can see if there are any obvious problems.


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## msbic (Oct 24, 2014)

-- In general, FreeBSD should run fine on any standard machine.
I had thought so too , except it doesn't always https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/i-need-help-installing-freebsd-10.47609/
This is my own post from earlier this year.


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## Oko (Oct 25, 2014)

msbic said:


> Good day all,
> I am looking to get myself a workstation for dual booting Windows and FreeBSD. Being lazy lately, I am leaning towards buying a name brand machine as opposed to building one from parts. It will be used for hobby programming, some document editing, no games (so I don't care much for an expensive video card).



I am not sure about Windows stuff but based upon what you described I would go with a WISE thin client which is $100 in U.S. 5 watts of electricity, no heat, no noise. While I was at a faculty at Georgia State I had one of those as my "desktop machine" running OpenBSD.  The client is a little bit bigger than  a pack of cigarettes.


For the second part of your question the best way to deal with UEFI is to just disable it.


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## rmoe (Oct 25, 2014)

msbic

Your specification is somewhat poor. You might want to tell us a little more, like class of CPU power, networking needs, extension desires (large box with lots of slots?) etc.

Very broadly speaking I have had good experiences with (Siemens)Fujitsu and IBM/Lenovo, ranging from quite small desktop boxes up to rather large servers.


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## Martillo1 (Oct 25, 2014)

I can advise about one thing: life is easier with each OS on its own disk.


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## msbic (Oct 27, 2014)

Oko said:


> I am not sure about Windows stuff but based upon what you described I would go with a WISE thin client which is $100 in U.S. 5 watts of electricity, no heat, no noise. While I was at a faculty at Georgia State I had one of those as my "desktop machine" running OpenBSD.  The client is a little bit bigger than  a pack of cigarettes.
> 
> 
> For the second part of your question the best way to deal with UEFI is to just disable it.



Thanks. I would need something like that, but for other purposes, like running a small web server.


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## msbic (Oct 27, 2014)

rmoe said:


> msbic
> 
> Your specification is somewhat poor. You might want to tell us a little more, like class of CPU power, networking needs, extension desires (large box with lots of slots?) etc.
> 
> Very broadly speaking I have had good experiences with (Siemens)Fujitsu and IBM/Lenovo, ranging from quite small desktop boxes up to rather large servers.



Thanks. I'd like a machine with an i5 Intel CPU. I don't need anything exceptional from the point of view of networking. 1Gbps network card will more than suffice (and they are pretty standard these days). I also don't need many available slots, possibly a PCI-e slot in case I'd want to buy a more powerful video card. But then again, this isn't even a must if the built-in adapter works  well enough.

I had previously heard good things about IBM/Lenovo. It's good to know this is still the case.


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## rmoe (Oct 27, 2014)

Yes, indeed. While I wouldn't heartedly recommend e.g. thinkstations as preferred choice, I haven't made bad experiences either. Based on what you just told, one of those small factor think-boxen might be just what you're looking for. I found them quite reliable.


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