how to install on laptop? video issue?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Peter van der
>Linden
>Sent: Sunday, June 19, 2005 7:06 PM
>To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: how to install on laptop? video issue?
>
>
>I want to install FreeBSD 5.4 onto a partition on my 1 year old HP
>laptop.
>
>I've done a lot of Linux distro installs, and sometimes I need to give
>the installer a hint about the graphics card,
>typically something  like:
>
>boot: linux vga=771
>
>When I try the FreeBSD installer, the screen goes blank about 5 seconds
>after it starts booting from the CD, typically at the point where it
>switches to X Window in a Linux install.
>

The FreeBSD 5.4 installer does not switch to a graphical X windows screen
during the installation precisely to prevent the sort of problem that
Linux
distros have with hardware like yours.  What most likely happened is that
something in
the FreeBSD kernel probe tickled some hardware in the laptop and made
the system either freeze up, or switch off the LCD screen.

You might try it with a monitor plugged into the video port and see what
happens - also try the keypress sequence on your laptop that switches the
video between screen and external port just to see if the screen comes
back.

Make sure your running the latest BIOS update for your laptop, you can
download that from HP.

Also see if there is an option to turn ACPI off in your BIOS and try
installing with it off.

You might have to turn it off at the boot loader with the command
unset acpi_load

This is discussed here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/laptop/article.html


Ted