Hardware

last updated Saturday, April 18 00:29:43 CEST 2009

Removing a disk

I had 2 disks. My primary was mounted on /usr/www and my secondary disk contained the rest of the os. I used the boot manager on both disks so that the the first disk could boot the second (I think it’s wise to allways install the bootmanager on all disks it gives you some freedom to move the disks around)

To remove the first disk and use only the second I firstly unmounted it

umount /usr/www

Then I remounted it on /mnt (in my case) it’s ad1s1e

mount /dev/ad1s1e /mnt

being the only partion on my first disk. Then I copied everything from /mnt to the now empty directory /usr/www

After that edit /etc/fstab bij removing every reference to the disk you want to remove and changing the partions on your second disk to your first disk eg ad1s1a becomes ad0s1e and ad1s1f becomes ad0s1f and so forth. Halt the machine and turn it off. Remove the first disk put the jumpers on the second disk in the apropriot position to function as master.Then turn on your computer let the bios setup recognize your disk .

Installing on a Toshiba 230cx laptop

Not long ago someone gave me a Toshiba 230cx laptop. This machine doesn’t have a floppy-drive but it does have a cdrom. It only has 16 MB of ram so i decided to install freebsd 4.11 .

If you want to access the setup hold down the esc button while powering up. You can then change the boot order to boot from cdrom.

But this machine just wouldn’t boot from the FreeBSD cdrom. Strange enough it would boot debian 3.0 , windows 98 , windows NT 4.0 ,and cdroms I made bootable with a dos boot floppy . I think the problem is the 2.88M image FreeBSD 4.x uses to boot. Because I don’t have a floppy drive for this machine (it can’t boot from usb either) I gave up and installed Debian Linux.

Debian however has in its ports collection a package called SBM (smart boot manager) the home-page is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr In the past I have used the foppy image of SBM to boot FreeBSD from machines that don’t have a bootable cdrom drive. See the site on how to make a floppy image If you install SBM from a running debian on your hard-disk it can then boot the FreeBSD cdrom. However SBM doesn’t seem to want to boot freebsd after it is installed so don’t forget to install the FreeBSD bootsector of boot manager when you’re installing Freebsd.

If you don’t want to go though the trouble of first installing Linux you can burn the sbm.bin floppy image on a bootable cdrom. You than boot from that cdrom at the boot menu you take out the SBM cdrom insert the freebsd cdrom and select cdrom from your boot menu.

My laptop is a dutch version but there is no dutch keymap. Selecting the UK iso keymap gives me access to all my keys.The CTL/pause combination than acts as scroll lock (the keyboard doesn’t have a scroll lock key)

If you’re building a custom kernel it would be wise to add:

options CLK_USE_I8254_CALIBRATION

to remove the “microuptime went backwards” kernel messages. and

options SC_TWOBUTTON_MOUSE

This option makes it possible to cut and past with the built in mouse

If you don’t like the black/white screen because it lacks contrast you could try a blue/white display .I like the blue white mutch better ( and is scares the hell out of windows users witch is an added bonus) if you add

options SC_NORM_ATTR=”(FG_WHITE|BG_BLUE)” options SC_NORM_REV_ATTR=”(FG_WHITE|BG_RED)”

to your kernel configuration. You make blue/white the default colors and white/red the inverse defaults.

By adding

options SC_PIXEL_MODE

to your kernel configuration and by adding

vesa_load=”YES”

to /boot/loader.conf

it is possible to use a 100 colls. by 37 lines screen mode after startup by typing

vidcontrol -g 100×37 VESA_800×600 lightwhite blue

if you like this layout you could add

allscreens_flags=”-g 100×37 VESA_800×600 lightwhite blue”

to /etc/rc.conf to make it the default for all your vt’s

By adding

device apm0

to your kernel configuration and by adding

apm_enable=”YES”

and

apmd_enable=”YES”

to your rc.conf you have a working power management.

The machine has a built in soundcard and built in speakers. I usually disable sound. With cdcontrol I usually start the CD player and I listen using the CD players headphone plug. (I just want to hear some music while I’m working.) This doesn’t work with this machine because the CD player doesn’t have a headphone plug but the soundcard does.

So in order to get the soundcard working I added

device pcm

device sbc0 at isa? port 0×220 irq 5 drq 1 flags 0×15

to the kernel configuration file. So by using

cdcontrol -f /dev/acd0c play

I have some music while I’m working. Through the speakers or the headphone (if I plug it in the speakers stop)

Now you’ve got your machine running on freebsd don’t forget to remove the designed for windows NT sticker.