Laptop questions

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Hey all.
> 
> I'm on the verge of getting myself a laptop.  As this is my first
> laptop, and I'm rewarding myself for a recent accomplishment, I
> figured I'd go all out and get the top of the line Dell.  I know, IBM
> has some great notebooks, as does Gateway and particularly Apple.  I'd
> like to get an Apple, but that would be out of line with the reason
> I'm rewarding myself.
> 
> Bottom line, I'll need to keep Windows on the system - relevant to the
> event for which I'm rewarding myself.  Still, I'd really, REALLY like
> to get FreeBSD (or some other *BSD) and/or *maybe* a Linux distro on
> there as well.  The hard drive is going to be a 100G, so I could
> probably squeeze at least 2 OSes on without much trouble.

Should be no problem.  Just read the stuff on dual booting a machine.

Make sure you leave the MS install in the original slice. (That is 
usually first, unless Dell also puts a diagnostic slice on it, then MS 
would be second slice)   It doesn't pay to try to change the position
where MS lives. 

Make sure all the MS install stuff is done first and then install the
FreeBSd stuff because MS doesn't respect anything else and will overwrite
MBRs and boot sectors and will not boot another system.   FreeBSD will 
both respect other systems and the FreeBSD MBRs will boot any other
system.   So, install FreeBSD last.

You will need to shrink the MS slice (which MS calls a partition) to 
make room for FreeBSD.    IF the MS slice only has FAT type slices,
they are are some free utilities that can be used to shrink the MS
slice and make room for a FreeBSD slice.   But, your laptop will probably
have an NTFS type file system and I don't know of any current free utility
that can shrink NTFS type file systems.   There are a couple fairly
inexpensive utilities on the market that can do it well.

I have had good success using Partition Magic from PowerQuest to manipulate
disk slices including NTFS types.   One thing to keep in mind.   Unless
you are working on a separate disk from the one you are booting the 
machine you cannot run from the installed copy.   To work on the main
disk (most likely your case with a laptop), you must make the boot
floppies it tells about in the Partition Magic documentation and then
boot from them to do the disk slice manipulation.    If you don't have
a floppy on the laptop, you need to hook one up, maybe via USB if can
be booted.   More recent versions of PM might be able to do this from
a bootable CD, but I don't know if they got around to it yet.

> So the question:  Has anyone successfully installed and run FreeBSD
> (or any other *BSD or Linux distro) on a Dell Inspirion XPS Gen 2? I'm
> planning to max out the RAM, include wireless networking, and sticking
> with the 2GHz CPU.  Other than that, it's pretty standard fare.  Any
> success stories would be most welcome.  If anyone has found that
> FreeBSD is not suited for this system (yet), or a specific Linux
> distro is ideally suited for this system, that would be a most welcome
> piece of info as well.

I haven't used that particular machine, but it is way bigger than
ones I have and there should be no problem with the capacity.  There
might be some complications with specific devices they include.  You
can check supported devices on the FreeBSD web site.   Click on the
'hardware' link under the FreeBSD version you plan to use and then
on the i386 in the list of CPU types on the next page.

////jerry

> Lou
> --=20
> Louis LeBlanc                          FreeBSD-at-keyslapper-DOT-net
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