I am the lucky owner of a Dell Xps M1330 laptop, and last week I just had too many problems with my laptop running vista family basic to my taste. Previously I actually found that the system was pretty good so far. I had overcome many of its shortcomings thanks to open source software, and the system was actually quite (and to my surprise somehow) stable :-)
... and so the problems start rising
I had a first alert with a nvidia video driver update. Seeing that an recommended update was available, I just installed following the usual click-click protocol. Once that bugger installed, my fan just went on full speed. Oh, no problem I thought, the little guy must have run into some cpu intensive little thingie and we'll be back to his usual quite mode soon. Well, no you silly, it just decided it was his new cruise speed now. Then my second thought was the usual stupid but weirdly very effective way out, so I just went and rebooted the computer. No luck, the fan would go off right from startup and would never get back to normal speed. So thanks to actually checkpoints made before upgrades, I kissed the recommended upgrade good-bye and the fan got back to normal sound levels. Then I had just a regular vista upgrade that would fail with some cryptic error code, that I actually really didn't have time to go check for a while... with the concern in mind that I could be potentially more exposed to danger that I usually am with a fully patched system. But the final straw was that I couldn't copy a zip file from the network neighborhood. I had just a popup box telling me that I didn't have the privilege to do that. What da ?!?! Tried to run the explorer with admin privileges didn't change this, and I finally had to catch the file with my friend's usb key. There is probably a (correct) way to do this, but I just don't feel like searching when I am using that os. If I have to play the adventurous way, I'd rather do that on a libre system.
And so let's try something new...
And so let's try something new...
That's why since a few days, the laptop is now running OpenBSD. I have wanted to try this one for a while, and being in vacation, I just decided it was the right time ;-)
I went on the install just the way it's written in the booklet given with the cd, and had no problem with that... I just changed a couple of values on the way to make the /tmp and /var more comfortable in terms of available space. And voila ! OpenBSD was booting in his usual blue background text.
Due to some restriction, the wireless card doesn't work right away, you need to download a firmware first. In my case achieving that is quite simple : plug the wire and ask the friendly dhcp server for an ip address :
# dhclient bge0
once you have access to the Internet, you can then add the package containing the package..
# pkg_add http://damien.bergamini.free.fr/packages/openbsd/wpi-firmware-2.14.1.5.tgz
From there, if you do as sir Schneier (and I ;-) does, a simple dhclient wpi0 will put you online through your wireless card.
From that you probably will want to set your $PKG_PATH to a mirror close to you, and then add mozilla-firefox.
pkg_add mozilla-firefox and voila...
More to come, as I am getting to have more fun with the fish...
Due to some restriction, the wireless card doesn't work right away, you need to download a firmware first. In my case achieving that is quite simple : plug the wire and ask the friendly dhcp server for an ip address :
# dhclient bge0
once you have access to the Internet, you can then add the package containing the package..
# pkg_add http://damien.bergamini.free.fr/packages/openbsd/wpi-firmware-2.14.1.5.tgz
From there, if you do as sir Schneier (and I ;-) does, a simple dhclient wpi0 will put you online through your wireless card.
From that you probably will want to set your $PKG_PATH to a mirror close to you, and then add mozilla-firefox.
pkg_add mozilla-firefox and voila...
More to come, as I am getting to have more fun with the fish...
