Note: I have not been updating this page for several months now. Among the things I have been experimenting with regarding the user interface and general appearance of my OpenBSD installation is window managers. Right now, however, I am sticking to FVWM.
In the summer of 2004 I purchased an Inspiron 8600 laptop from Dell. It came with Windows XP Home Edition pre-installed taking up one big partition. Resizing the partition using Partition Magic made Windows XP unable to boot, so I went for a re-install.
The installation of OpenBSD is remarkably easy. Following the Installation Guide linked to from OpenBSD.org, I managed to make my first installation work just like I intended. A little word of advice: OpenBSD's `fdisk' utility is very powerful, and if one feels uncertain of its capabilities, the `cfdisk' program is a very good alternative in my opinion. It can be found on most Linux installation CDs that let you hop into a full-control virtual terminal.
Of untested hardware remain my USB FireWire, the built-in modem and the 802.11a/b WLAN card. Among that which worked without tweaking were auto-detection of the 15.4" WXGA screen, my Microsoft IntelliMouse 3.0 hooked up with USB, the touchpad (PS/2), the ATI Mobilility Radeon 9600 graphics card. For details, look in my `dmesg' output.
Not being an experienced OpenBSD user, sound output was either muted or turned completely up. I decided to define some defaults at boot-time, and currently have an `/etc/rc.sound' containing the following: (It's being loaded in the end of `/etc/rc.local' by the simple code `[ -f /etc/sound ] && . /etc/rc.sound'):
#! /bin/sh MT="/usr/bin/mixerctl" $MT outputs.master=151,151 $MT outputs.headphones=163,163 $MT inputs.cd=191,191 $MT outputs.master.mute=off $MT outputs.headphones.mute=off $MT inputs.cd.mute=off $MT inputs.mic=191 $MT inputs.mic.mute=on
60GB is a lot of space, so I spent 8GB on Windows and 8GB on OpenBSD. I haven't decided upon the rest, but they will most likely be mounted as msdos partitions to put music and films on. Here is the output of `df -h' with my Windows partition and a CD-ROM currently mounted, and a `du -sh':
$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/wd0a 147M 35.4M 104M 25% / /dev/wd0g 3.0G 29.0M 2.8G 1% /home /dev/wd0d 147M 10.0K 140M 0% /tmp /dev/wd0f 3.0G 331M 2.5G 12% /usr /dev/wd0e 98.3M 8.4M 84.9M 9% /var /dev/wd0j 7.8G 3.5G 4.3G 45% /mnt/windows /dev/cd0c 585M 585M 0B 100% /mnt/cdrom $ du -sh /usr/X11R6 /usr/local 119M /usr/X11R6 29.5M /usr/local
A `dmesg' for my system is available.
Written by Simon Shine at Sun Dec 26 09:28:13 CET 2004. Updated at Mon Jul 05 17:27:30 CEST 2005