My desktop was running CentOS 5 on one drive, but I had another on which Win7 was installed. Since I put that copy back on the Inspiron my wife is using, I had to nuke it off my machine. However, Win7 did some weird stuff with my SATA drive, so I had to use CentOS and the dd command to erase the whole thing, and fill it with zeros. Once that was done, the FreeBSD installer worked normally. I used the Netinstall disk because I like to build it from scratch.
If I’m going to fool with rolling release, I might as well have it my way. So I’ve spent the last couple of days building FreeBSD 8.0 on my machine. It seemed best to stay with i386 architecture and simply optimize make on k8. This evening, I finally finished with GNOME 2.28 and got it working. You have to manually insert the command to run the GNOME background stuff in your boot configuration. Of course, GDM comes with zero config and it didn’t allow me to login normally. Also, you have to make sure to mount the proc file system, manually putting it in fstab, as well, and give your user account permissions to mount things like flash drives.
That’s the FreeBSD way of things. You have to do a lot of reading just to get stuff done which is typically automated elsewhere. But I think it’s worth it. Got sound and nVidia support without trouble. Next, I’m going to install HPLIP and set up my printer, but that requires compiling a particular driver out of the kernel first. I suppose in a few days I’ll have it. Again, I feel it’s worth it.
Update: It’s a bust. That is, I can’t get the printer to work. It requires the latest HPLip package, and somewhere in the big pile of print-related software I had to install, the whole thing failed to even recognize the device. Without the printer, it’s about useless to me. Otherwise, it was truly fine software.
