Netbooks & BSD

[bdsfbsd at att.net]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:50:05 -0400, Mike Jeays <mike.jeays at rogers.com>  
wrote:

> On October 19, 2010 10:29:46 pm Gary Kline wrote:
>>
>> 	$150 is seriously in my price range [!]  But what about the
>> 	optical drive?  If I can buy one on sale and install FBSD from a
>> 	CD or DVD, do all optivcal drive fit all notebooks?
>>
>> 	(( I remember seeing ads on amazon.com saying that "people who
>> 	purchased this notebook have also bought:)
>>
>> 	With a few things that I probably will buy.  An optical, a 16 or
>> 	32G SSD ... &c.)  So if there is a fire-sale at Costco or
>> 	<<wherever>> for an HP 9" or 10  Atom notebook, will I be able
>> 	to use another vendor's optical drive?
>>
>> 	gary
>>
>> 	PS:  I really _was_ current on hardware stuff.  Back in the VAX
>> 	780 days :-)
>>
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>
> I would expect a USB optical drive to work. I plugged an old DVD drive  
> into
> one of those boxes that hold an IDE hard disk and plug into a USB port,  
> and it
> worked fine on my (Linux) ASUS EeePC 1000. It looked pretty amateurish,  
> but it
> did work.
>

BTW, if you're thinking of getting the optical drive just for the install,  
it isn't necessary. Memstick install is really the way to go with these  
devices:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/install-pre.html#INSTALL-BOOT-MEDIA

To be honest, though, getting FreeBSD running properly on one of these is  
really more of a hobbyist project at the moment, and requires some  
research, time, and experimentation. Yes, I have mine mostly running like  
I want, but I'd be a bit pressed to describe in detail all the steps I  
took, but it was more than a few, and my requirements were minimal. I  
could not give a solid reason for using FreeBSD on my netbook other than I  
felt like it, and because all things being equal I prefer *BSD. Maybe with  
lots of community participation enough documentation could be generated to  
make it more straightforward, but that is not the current state of affairs.

Brian