Subversion hosting, CVS hosting, Trac hosting, Bugzilla hosting and software collaboration Providing hosted Subversion, CVS, Trac and Bugzilla repositories
 

March 20, 2008

Loading The Laptop With DesktopBSD

Filed under: Operating Systems — Tags: , — Greg Larkin @ 6:21 pm

Hi everyone,

As you may have noticed, I’m a pretty big proponent of FreeBSD. Lately, I’ve been interested in building a laptop that is light, has long battery life, can do basic email checking/web site browsing/remote server admin over SSH/etc. A bonus would be if I could run FreeBSD in a VMware VM and work on my ports if I’m stuck on a long plane ride.

Wait a minute – forget the VM! I’ll just run DesktopBSD directly on the laptop and have everything I need:

  • Email – check (Thunderbird)
  • Web browsing – check (FF, natch)
  • SSH – check
  • Full /usr/ports tree – check!

I’ve got version 1.6 loaded up on my venerable IBM Thinkpad 600x that had been mothballed for a couple of years, and after replacing the CMOS battery (go away nasty POST 161/163 errors!), and replacing the first-gen wireless PCMCIA card with a Linksys WPC54G, things are humming along nicely.

I did have to wrestle with the drivers for the Linksys card, guided largely by a helpful post on TaoSecurity, but eventually I got it working.

I’m currently in building the OpenOffice 2.x port so I can really get things done remotely, but it has been compiling for 2+ days now (!), and there’s no indication when it will finish!

I’ll post more about DesktopBSD as I get further into it.

Bookmark and Share

Keep in touch,
Greg
SourceHosting.net, LLC


No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.


Call me - Greg Larkin: error

Powered by WordPress