The FreeBSD Handbook is the primary source of documentation produced by the FreeBSD Documentation Project. This new edition contains over 650 pages of material about FreeBSD and has been completely updated to reflect FreeBSD 4.X and 5.0-CURRENT. More information at BSDToday. In related news, “FreeBSD Unleashed” by Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann was also released recently. The book is published by SAMS Publishing and you can buy it at the Daemonnews Mall. Update: The “FreeBSD Unleashed” book includes the latest version of FreeBSD 4.4 in its cover CD-ROM as well as a snapshot of the FreeBSD-CURRENT 5.0 unstable branch.
FreeBSD Handbook Second Edition Now Available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I am thinking of installing FreeBSD 4.4 on my laptop. I only have 800 MB available for it though. So, my question is if anyone knows if it will be enough to install some basic packages and XFree 4.1.0 (I hope that the Neomagic 128XD gfx chipset works with X, because it has major screen artifacts when used with VESA as I experienced from this http://freshmeat.net/projects/natld/“>small that I tried today).
If you woun’t use kde or hnome I think it will be enough.
Hi Eugenia,
a friend of mine work with FreeBSD 4.4 and XFree4.0.1 on a 500MB Harddisk, so i think it _should_ be possible. We only installed the base system, XFree and Xemacs and he still have some space to work.
Can’t tell you exactly for _your_ hardware (‘specially for your gfx chipset) and XFree 4.1.0, but why not give it a try?
Greetings
Tom
He use only twm as windowmanager, no bloated WM like KDE/Gnome.
Eugenia, you should go to xfree86.org and check to see if 4.1.0 has support for your video card. Problem areas for BSD laptop installs are usually the peripherals. Laptop manufacturing is *very* non-standard with respect to manufacturing components and configurations.
WinModems aren’t supported (yet). I know there are Linux people working on that. I don’t know if they completed the project, and, if it ports to BSD. I can’t comment on support for intergrated network chip sets. There is plenty of PCMCIA modem and network support. External modems are usually no problem either.
Audio chipsets are narrowly supported.
I’ve never had a problem getting BSD onto a laptop. However, running 800×600 in command line mode only can be kind of annoying after a while.
Mike
Thank you for your comments guys.
I am thinking of getting the book so I can get hold of the 4.4 version of FreeBSD. I am on 33.6/56k kbps (depends how AOL connects) modem these days, so downloading the whole thing is not a great idea, at least until I move houses again and get my DSL back.