So I tried running Leenux on my shiny new dell d620 laptop. Since my linux skills suck and specifically since the 4th FC4 CD was fubar, I ditched the whole "put linux on my laptop" experiment and turned to FreeBSD.

fbsd 6.2 is lovely !. I used the 24 MB "boot" only iso image to get a install kernel on my box and performed the ports/packages install over the net. Very nice !

After spending a day configuring stuff I finally have the following working (or almost working..)

• Video @1200x800 - thanks to 915resolution - which was in "ports" yeah
• Sound ! - had to get the snd_hda.ko driver.
• Skype !!!! - yeah baby - (linux abi ofcourse :D)
• xmms for my lovely mp3's
• mplayer for all those pron mpegs.
• firefox with flash7 (linux binaries). The flash 9 crashes :( and there are no native flash binaries...
• Java ! - yeah both the linux and native jdk
• wired NIC - bge
• USB - works like a charm
• Wireless - if_wpi - maybe works maybe not - don't know - have to test yet - saw a bunch of mem align warnings on console though
• fvwm2 -- mmm
• acpi - well atleast I have it configured in my custom kernel

So - freebsd is going to stay on my new laptop from now on. Feeling happy!