FreeBSD on a Dell Latitude D600
Posted 2006-07-23 21:50. Tagged hack, freebsd.
I recently bought a (used) Dell Latitude D600. On this page I intended to describe what I do to get my operating system of choice, FreeBSD, to work properly with it. But in reality, this page seems to be more of a list of things that Just Works™ …
I use FreeBSD 5.5, since neither I nor anyone else has ported Arla to version 6.x yet.
Graphics
Since I want to play with accelerated OpenGL, this is where I expected trouble, with having to download separate binary-only drivers and what not. But to my surprise, I just started up X11, and had working DRI before even trying.
This is how it should work, and how it does work with FreeBSD and Xorg.
Sound and removable media
The sound driver didn’t load by default, but adding the line
snd_ich_load="YES" to the file /boot/loader.conf took care of
that.
Playing and reading audio and data CD:s just works, as well as playing DVD movies (using xine).
Mounting my umass mp3 player also just works, but to allow myself to
mount it as myself (rather than having to su), I add vfs.usermount=1
to /etc/sysctl.conf. To make the mounting more convenient, so I
just have to type mount /mnt/pod rather than a full set of options,
I also add a line to /etc/fstab:
/dev/da0s1 /mnt/pod msdos rw,noauto 0 0
Notice the noauto option! Since the drive needs to be explicitly
unmounted before I remove it, I don’t want it to mount itself
automatically at any time.
ACPI / Battery status
The ACPI reporting of battery status also just works, as well as the gnome panel applet for reporting it. There is also an applet for lowering CPU frequency (for longer battery time) that just works.
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