I lost the C drive in my venerable Inspiron 8200 I have installed a temporary replacement C drive and I have a Seagate ST910021A on order for it. If I can get that drive to work with my Inspiron 8200, I am going to install a quad boot XP-FreeBSD-Solaris-Fedora Core system. So far I have installed dual boot configurations with XP and each of the other OS's and I eventually got it work with Solaris and Fedora Core. I have just started on the dual boot XP FreeBSD. After the install, the os boots, but X is not running. Referring to the FreeBSD handbook, I see that this is an intentional result. Configuring X is a separate step. The quad-boot will be a very rough install, but the the result will be awesome. For the record, the lost C drive was XP and Redhat 8.
I will try to get X running sometime over the next few days and while I do not expect this to be a piece of cake, I also do not anticipate any complete showstopper. But I won't try the quad boot install until I have complete success with each dual boot install. And getting X running on FreeBSD is the final step to that. What problem did you have with FreeBSD on a Laptop?
Out of interest, is there any difference between BSD on Desktop PC and on a Laptop? I tried once to install BSD in a dual boot with XP on my Sony VAIO laptop, but it never entered into X, it directly took me to text-mode login. I couldn't fix that at that time and then I left it for another time and only relied on XP.
i can tell u from experience that freebsd will run beautifully on a dell insp 8200. the only thing thats iffy is acpi... which is never guaranteed to work fully on ANY laptop. the exception might be acpi, which i could never get to work fully. but thats not really a big deal.
I was not pleased with the way X was left to the user. It suddenly became clear why DesktopBSD exists. I tried that and it was running fine in 10 minutes. Easiest os I ever installed. As for FreeBSD, I think is more aimed towards a server than a laptop. We use it more our NTP servers at work and we don't care about X in that case.
Actually, I am bumping into the same problem Houscous did in this thread, except I find that even Linux needs at least one primary partition. I only get 4 partition entries in the MBR. So I can have 4 primaries. Or I can have 3 primaries and one chain of logicals. I really need the second setup so I am limited to only 3 OS's. Sorry, BSD. I will pick XP, Solaris 10, and a Linux. I haven't completely given up yet. But installing into primaries and copying into logical partitions didn't work. I tried to trick BSD into installing in a logical partition. It simply reused the first partition entry in the MBR Good thing I had a premade rescue cd. I have a few more tricks to try, but I'm losing hope of having all the OS's I want.
I have installed a temporary replacement C drive and I have a Seagate ST910021A on order for it. If I can get that drive to work with my Inspiron 8200, I am going to install a quad boot XP-FreeBSD-Solaris-Fedora Core system. So far I have installed dual boot configurations with XP and each of the other OS's and I eventually got it work with Solaris and Fedora Core. I have just started on the dual boot XP FreeBSD. After the install, the os boots, but X is not running. Referring to the FreeBSD handbook, I see that this is an intentional result. Configuring X is a separate step. The quad-boot will be a very rough install, but the the result will be awesome. For the record, the lost C drive was XP and Redhat 8.