a crank’s progress

I have found very little comprehensive information about running *BSD on a laptop: Linux has its linux on a laptop site, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent for FreeBSD or NetBSD.

The additional links below may help address that.

It’s a ThinkPad A20m/2628:
CPU: Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon/Celeron (597.41-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = “GenuineIntel” Id = 0×683 Stepping = 3
Features=0×383f9ff E36,MMX,FXSR,SSE>
real memory = 134152192 (131008K bytes)

Things that don’t quite work: sound and apm, but a new kernel (building now) may resolve those.

the kernel config file from my laptop.

my dmesg output to help see what devices are detected and used.

my X config: works fine. I found that using xf86config worked better than XFree86 -configure.

I had to add a couple of lines to /etc/rc.conf to get my Cisco Aironet 340 working: here they are.

pccard_enable=”YES”
pccard_ifconfig=”inet 192.168.2.10 netmask 255.255.255.0″

The card was detected and used with no other work on my part.

I did get sound working today (6/19) by rebuilding with the pcm and csa devices enabled. To use xmms and KDE I needed to build and install the xmms-arts plugin.

One problem I often have with FreeBSD and some ports is the tendency to insert the version in the name of the file, so gtk-config (version 1.2) becomes gtk12-config. Configure scripts won’t find it so I always find myself making symlinks to make sure everything is found.
ln -s /usr/local/bin/glib12-config /usr/local/bin/glib-config
ln -s /usr/X11R6/bin/gtk12-config /usr/X11R6/bin/gtk-config

Here’s the briefest summary of the differences between the GENERIC kernel config and mine:

[/usr/src/sys/i386/conf]# diff -u GREEN GENERIC | grep -v “#”
— GREEN Wed Jun 19 09:05:59 2002
+++ GENERIC Thu May 23 10:04:01 2002
@@ -17,9 +17,6 @@

-
machine i386
cpu I386_CPU
cpu I486_CPU
@@ -30,9 +27,9 @@

@@ -230,11 +227,11 @@

@@ -256,44 +253,3 @@
-device an
-device pcm
-device csa

Hope it helps.