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

The hard drive in my laptop was showing signs of failing, so I decided to replace it. I took the opportunity to upgrade from a 30GB/4200 rpm drive to a 60GB/5400 rpm drive. I am looking forward to seeing if there is a significant performance boost from the faster drive. There are many howtos out there that talk about transferring FreeBSD to another system, but the ones I found where all on desktop machines where they could just hook up both drives at the same time. In my case, I have a laptop. Therefore, I can only hook up one drive at a time without purchasing new equipment so this guide is for all those who are in my situation. The basic idea is to use tar to compress the various partitions, somehow copy the archives somewhere, replace the drive, install the base system, copy the archives onto the new drive and decompress them to restore the original file system. I decided on this approach because I can change partition sizes without any problem. To transfer the archives, I u

My preferred environment is FreeBSD with the Ion3 window manager; however, for my job I need to run MS Windows so I installed vmware3 from ports and made a WinXP Pro virtual machine. If you have used vmware on FreeBSD before, you may have had trouble getting it to work full-screen. There may be a solution, but I have not looked hard enough to find it yet. I came up with a workaround, though. Use rdesktop to connect through the virtual network interface and a run a full-screen RDP session! I got the inspiration from doing the same thing with my office computer. Then I thought, why not connect to the virtual machine the same way? So I tried "rdesktop -a 24 -g 1280x1024 -D -K vmhostname" and it worked! Of course, I had to add an entry in my hosts file to map vmhostname to the I.P. address of the virtual machine and turn on Remote Desktop in Windows. If you are not familiar with rdesktop, you can install it using ports. It is found at net/rdesktop. The "-a 24"