Installing FreeBSD 5.2.1/6.1.0 on Dell Inspiron 700 m

This article details my experience in installing FreeBSD 5.2.1 on a Dell Inspiron 700 m.

UPDATE: Installed FreeBSD 6.1 -- It "just works" Haven't tried the wifi yet, though

UPDATE: Unless you have 2G RAM, and then the network kernel panics :-(

Because I tend to ramble, tell stories, and explain why I did what I did, and because all you really care about is doing whatever needs doing to make the damn thing work, I'll show things you really need to read like this:

This article has virtually nothing to do with PHP, but is here because it fit better here than in my Music Advice articles.

I don't really have any use for the Windows XP Home Edition that came installed on my laptop, but Dell categorically refused to not install an OS. So I stuck with the cheapest one, being forced to buy software I didn't want, didn't need, and pretty much abhor.

So I figured if I paid for it, I might as well keep it. I guess it could be easier to convert my MiniDisks of original music to CD under Windows, right? (see below)

When you first start up your laptop, in addition to the incredibly annoying MacAfee popups that you CANNOT stop from appearing over and over and over without registering (Aaaargggh!) and the equally annoying Windows Update popups that keep insisting that you reboot your computer over and over and over, even though the update was an entirely non-critical bit of nothing, and the incredibly annoying popups for... (And they wonder why I hate Windows?)

Be particularly careful about the hard drive, video card, monitor (even if it just says "Generic Plug n Play") and networking cards (wireless and wired). And the sound card, if you want sound. Or anything else you care about. USB, FireWire (aka 1394), etc. I ain't got that far myself yet, but if you need it, write it down.

If you *DO* manage to screw up and wipe out your Windows, you'll at least know what hardware is in the thing, and be able to converse intelligently with the awesome FreeBSD folks about what's giving you trouble.

Please note that I've been using FreeBSD for, at most, approximately 7.34 man-hours longer than you have at this point.

Emailing me direct and asking for help on anything other than what I've covered here is likely to be incredibly unproductive.

Use Dogpile, read the FAQs and Docs, and then bug the mailing lists where real experts hang out.

UPDATE: Dogpile rocks, but I worked for Info.com for a year, and I think they're more aggressive about getting content, so give them a try. You can tack on your search terms after the 'info.com/' and it just works. Except you have to pretend to be stupid and not use + for space or %22 for " which is stupid of Info.com to not urldecode it, but I never did convince my ex-boss of that...

I just got lucky, mostly, figuring this stuff out.

Exactly how much you shrink it, and how much room you allocate for FreeBSD is really more up to your needs than any advice I could give you. I had 80G to play with, so gave 20G to Windows and 60G to FreeBSD, since I plan on using FreeBSD way more than Windows.

In fact, since MS is calling me a thief for trying to import MiniDisk audio for which I own the copyrights, the one thing I actually thought Windows would be useful for, it isn't. I'm working on getting a refund, after which I will happily wipe Windows off this drive forever.

UPDATE: Okay, I lied. I never bugged them for a refund, they changed their EULA so that you can't get a refund, and I left Windows on there until FreeBSD 6 came out, cuz I need 'net, and will still leave it there for browser testing.

Of course, you may want to leave some room for Windows, especially as you'll probably be installing all kinds of bloated software on it...

There are a lot of programs to re-partition hard drives. FIPS is totally awesome, which might be why a half-dozen people recommended it to me, and why every 'Net search I could think of turned that up as the solution, despite the fact that FIPS cannot shrink an NTFS partition!

I also was challenged by the fact that FIPS wouldn't even think about running in Windows, and there is no way to start up just MS-DOS with the pre-installed Windows XP Home Edition. Granted, I and others, have been bashing Microsoft for decades for having sucky MS-DOS as the underlying real OS. But that was just trash talking. Don't strand us without a real DOS-only system!

Especially when the error message you display when I do try to run FIPS under Windows XP makes it abundantly clear that, despite the semantics of Microsoft's claim that there is no MS-DOS in XP, the guts of the thing is still a 16-bit piece of junk software that is the remnants of MS-DOS, just so scattered and disassociated that you won't let me boot to MS-DOS. NOTE: Ignore that "Safe Mode with Command Prompt" option you get with F12 -- It starts Windows with an MS-DOS "emulator" shell screen.

Partition Magic is a commercial alternative, which I used ages and ages ago, and many people swear by it, and it is alleged to be able to shrink NTFS partitions (and do just about anything else to any other kind of partition). But I don't have it now, and didn't really feel like running out to buy it.

The other choices, all of them, were able to only read, or maybe grow, an NTFS partition. None could shrink an existing NTFS partition. Except one.

The incredibly awesome [XXXXXX] is able to shrink NTFS partitions.

Alas, getting just [XXXXX] on an bootable CD is not really an option. I dunno why they don't distribute it that way, but it's OpenSource and free, so you can't complain too much. Advice about downloading all of Mandrake or similarly-sized software packages did not appeal. Fortunately, I eventually found the System Rescue CD with [XXXXXX] and a ton of other weapons.

UPDATE: [XXXXX] is that run_qparted thingie whose real name is maybe QPartEditor? but System Rescue CD pretty much tells you what to type when you boot, so I still haven't figured out what it's called, despite using it 5 times now. It still Rocks! The things that "just work" you don't remember, I guess...

Since this seemed like an incredibly useful thing to have around, and it was only one CD, I went with that.

Of course, the burning software provided by Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition is too stupid to open up and burn an ISO image, at least as far as I could tell. So you will probably want to burn the ISO images on another Linux box with cdrecord or something. If you need help burning CDs, go here.

You can do this in the "Control Panel" "Computer Management" with "Administrative Tools" by right-clicking on the C drive, going to "Properties", then "Tools", and the clicking "Defragment Now"

You may be able to get to the Defragment easier than that, but that's the way I found it.

You may also need to set your Explorer/Folder Options to not be hiding System files, hidden files, etc from you, so that those files can be moved by the Defragment process. Or maybe I just got lucky and the files weren't at the tail end of the drive like Microsoft used to do, just to make my life miserable.

You have to watch very carefully, but as your laptop boots, for a very brief period of time, you can press F2 to enter the BIOS. If you don't catch it, just re-boot, and try again. You can actually hit F2 before the message appears. So long as you see "Entering Setup" you're good. (It should really say "Entering BIOS Setup")

Read the instructions in the BIOS, and arrow left/right over to Boot, and then arrow down to CD, and then use + to move the CD to the top of the list -- or at least above the HDD (hard drive) option. Then move to Exit and choose "Save and Exit" You can learn more about BIOS here.

For me at least, I was able to ignore that warning about doing funky things before running the re-partition program.

Also, don't make the two partitions exactly the same size -- It's a bit of a "comfort factor" to know you wiping the right partition when you install FreeBSD if you are 100% certain because of the size difference that you are choosing the right partition to wipe out.

If it won't let you do that, you probably have not really successfully de-fregmented your hard drive to the point where all your Windows files are crammed into the space where you want them. Go back a few steps, and re-do the defragmenting, and look at the pretty colors for where Windows defragment put stuff. Unless you see a lot of white space on the right, with no coloring to the right of it, you haven't succeeded.

Whew, man that was the scariest part. If you can still re-boot into Windows without the thing blowing up, you've succeeded.

Now it's time to finally actually install FreeBSD. Of course you need to download and burn the ISOs. I snagged them all, but it turned out I only needed disk 1. If you've got bandwidth to burn, it's always nice to have the full set, and a CDR is what?, $0.20?

Again, your needs will dictate what you install. I went for the middle of the road Distribution, and then dug through some additional packages for stuff I thought I might need. None of which had anything to do with what you need, so I shan't bother you with the details.

One of the biggest pains with installing a new Un*x is always XFree86 -- This is not said to slag the XFree86 Developers.

When you consider the myriad hardware, video card, monitor combinations out there, and dig into just how different they are, it's a wonder any OS manages to make anything remotely like what you expect show up on the monitor.

Still here are some special notes from my attempts to configure XFree86 on this box.

Thank God for /var/log/XFree86.0.log!!!

If you are having trouble with X Windows read that log.

Read every line of it, carefully.

You may not understand half that crap.

I certainly don't.

And I doubt that there are 10 guys on the planet that understand all those HEX numbers and whatnot that get spewed out in bunches of lines. So, okay, skim past those.

But really focus on the rest, especially if you see anything remotely mentioning the hardware that's giving you trouble.

Like, say, your screen.

The screen that is detected in the Log file, and is notated as a 1280x800 geometry.

The same screen that all of the configure programs decided could do 640x480, 800x600 and maybe even ####x### but not one of them really got right...

Note to XFree86 Developers: Your startx and logging is "smart enough" to figure out that it's a 1280x800 screen, so it would be Really Nifty ™ if your configurators could share that code.

I'm sure I just naively grossly over-simplified about 1,000 hours of programming, but there ya go. :-)

More will be posted here, assuming I get farther along than I am now... I hope.