PC-BSD on an IBM Thinkpad 600E
jbe...@islandnet.com
seductive one, so I downloaded the PC-BSD 1.1 iso and burned it to a
CD. I then loaded it on to a 1999-era 600E with 288 MB RAM, 366 MHz
PII processor, on a 12 GB hard drive.
I am a complete *nix noob, although I have older experience with CP/M,
DOS, Concurrent DOS, DR-DOS, OS/2, Win95, and Win2K. My number one
criterion in choosing PC-BSD was the implicit promise that it would
never ask me to rebuild the kernel or any such act of tech devotion.
The executive summary is this: although I was able to complete the
installation, view the pretty desktop images and play the provided
games, this was not a "prime time" experience because the install did
not seem to activate the PCMCIA / carbus ports on the 600E. This made
it impossible to make any broadband connection (well, maybe on the USB
1.1 port, but I don't happen to have any USB ethernet adapters). So
PC-BSD was not useful on this computer. A minor point was that it was
not able to activate the 600E soundcard, and looking at old posts from
2005, that is standard.
That's the important part. I'm now going to record a few details of
the experience. Maybe somebody will read this and be able to make
obvious improvements.
1. The install twice failed at the 62% mark, indicating a bad CD. The
exact message was bzip2 compression failed. I polished the CD and it
worked the third time. But the message that accompanied the failure
was "Please check the CD, or try selecting 'Safe Mode' when the
installation CD begins booting. The system will now reboot."
a) The CD eject button was locked until after reboot.
b) Near the beginning of the installation process, a screen comes up
for 2? seconds asking which mode you want to use. Spacebar pauses the
process. So I pressed spacebar to make sure that I was reading the
menu, that it truely was accepting keyboard input, and to push the
right key ("3") for safe mode. However, when I pressed "3", the
process just continued, it did not even echo the key to the screen.
Later I thought back to DOS days, and perhaps the second key worked
like a second pause (^S) in DOS, in other words, all it did was unpause
the screen; maybe I should have pressed "33". Maybe. Well, I think the
key hit should be echoed to the screen, and that the installer should
output a blank line, a message telling which install option was chosen,
then another blank line. So I don't know if I chose Safe Mode or not,
but eventually the install completed.
2. I don't know if the install is supposed to detect the keyboard used,
but this one defaulted to 104-key standard keyboard. I manually
selected the option for IBM Thinkpad keyboards, including the 600E, the
machine in question.
3. During install, there are a few places, such as auto logon, where
the user has an option. But instead of the familiar dot or X or check
mark, PC-BSD uses a box with a shade of gray. The shade is slightly
darker if the option is chosen.
4. Once the install finished, I wanted to access the help documents,
which required building a search index. The message was "Index
Creation finished", but it still didn't work. I tried again and this
time looked in the Details, which finished with the words "htdig
failed", whatever that means. So a more appropriate message might have
been "Index Creation failed", eh?
5. Fooling around, I was able to change the default screensaver, and
test the one I chose (with a romantic message to my wife), but when the
screensaver finally engaged, it was the default one.
6. An early KDE tip is "you can make a window go under ... by middle
clicking on its titlebar". I tried that, clicking the scroll wheel on
the wheelmouse, no effect.
7. Subjectively, the OS was a bit slower than any version of Windows
I've used, but I guess that's a price of stability.
8. There didn't seem any way to check the validity of the CD before
wiping the hard drive. Well, I might try something else before
reloading the quick but unstable Windows 98 that came with the machine.
--
Jonathan Berry