Mac at Work (was FreeBSD on Dell C400, and other stuff)

Installing FreeBSD was a rather painless procedure. I first used a Knoppix disk to resize my windows partition to make some space for FreeBSD, then I booted from the FreeBSD 6.0 installer disk. Installation is fairly painless if you pick the standard installation because it goes step-by-step. BSD uses one slice (what we normally think of as partitions) for it everything. It then divides that slice into sub-units that it calls partitions (they would be sub-partitions in a linux or windows paradigm). Choosing how much space to give to /, /usr/, etc really depends on what you want to use your system for, so you will have to divide up your slice. There are many good resources including the FreeBSD handbook that can help with that. I will note that I reserved 1GB for swap because I plan to upgrade my RAM later. If you plan to optimize your system, I highly recommend you install the sources for everything during the installation routine. You can get the latest sources over the inter...

The purpose of this blog is to document my adventures with FreeBSD on my Dell Latitude C400 laptop and other machines. It will serve as a knowledge base for myself, and I hope it is useful for others who have similar systems. I am new to the blog scene, so it may take a while for me to figure out how everything works. One word of caution to those who post comments. Profanity or derogatory remarks will deleted as soon as I notice them. I am the sole judge of what constitutes profanity and derogatory remarks. It is hard to know where to start. I guess a short introduction is in order. I am a civil engineer graduated from Brigham Young University. My current employment is with at the Engineering Research and Development Center of the Army Corps of Engineers. I work with hydraulic and hydrologic computer models. I have a wife and one son who is almost two years old now. I grew up fixing computers with my dad. I have been running *nix for about 4 years now. I would not call mys...