Introduction

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 myself an expert at all, but I am not a novice either. I started with a brief stint using Red Hat 9.0, soon found Debian and used it for about 2 years on an old Dell Latitude Cpi-A. I got a new laptop, an HP Pavilion dv4000, that was very nice. I decided to try Ubuntu on it and was pleased when everything worked out-of-the-box. I tried installing FreeBSD 5.3 on my desktop when it came out and had some troubles I did not know how to resolve, so I left it alone until 5.4 was released. I successfully installed FreeBSD 5.4 on my HP laptop and played around with KDE for a while. Although the HP was a nice machine, I wanted something smaller, so I returned it and bought my current machine which is a Dell Latitude C400.

If I remember correctly, this C400 has never had Linux installed on it. It came preinstalled with Windows 2000 and StarOffice. I used Windows for while, but missed unix. When FreeBSD 6.0 was released, I decided to commit to learning it and installed it on my laptop. The specs follow:

1.2 GHz Pentium 3m
256 MB RAM
Intel i830 integrated graphics
12.1" LCD operating at 1024x768
30 GB Hard drive
3Com 3C920 Integrated Fast Ethernet Controller
Internal Dell TrueMobile 1390 WLAN card (Prism chipset)
PCTEL 2304WT V.92 MDC Modem
Crystal CS4205 Audio chipset
Built-in microphone, speakers, headphone and mic ports
2-button touchpad, 2-button trackpoint
1 Type-I PCMCIA slot
1 USB 1.1 port
1 Serial port
1 VGA port
External DVD/CDRW combo drive.

The result of my efforts which will be described in coming posts is a system that I am rather pleased with. My resulting system works wonderfully for me:
Operating system: FreeBSD 6.1
X version: Xorg 6.9.0
Terminal Emulator: urxvt
Window Manager: ion3
Web Browser: Opera v 9.0 beta for Linux
Music Player: XMMS
Video Player: MPlayer
Editor: vim
Text document creator: latex
Photo editor: gimp 2.2.10
Office suite: OpenOffice.org 2.0

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