Activating the wireless on your Dell Latitude D630 is fairly easy. For whatever reason its not supported in the default generic kernel, but all it takes is adding a few lines to a config file. A added the following lines to the /boot/loader.conf: if_wpi_load=”YES” wlan_load=”YES” wlan_amrr_load=”YES” firmware_load=”YES” wpifw_load=”YES” legal.intel_wpi.license_ack=1 These steps are also outlined in the wpi man page (man wpi). It tells you exactly the lines that need to go into the /boot/loader.conf. So, if you ever happen to forget again, at least that much of the instructions are on your machine (assuming you have man pages installed.) At this point you should be able to reboot and be able to use your wireless. I use the following commands to activate and connect to an access point: ifconfig wpi0 up ifconfig wpi0 list scan Read more

Last you heard from me I was trying out FreeBSD 7.0 and mentioned that I would try to write down some of the things that I’d learned. For this post I thought I’d outline the steps I took to do my installation, including getting all the goodies working (wireless, sound, etc). This guide is hardware-specific to the Dell Latitude D630. Installation To begin the installation I used the steps outlined on this post (USB based installation). I used the entire drive and partitioned as follows: 512M / 2G swap 2G /var 1G /tmp [remaining] /usr I then selected the “Minimal” option, for a base install around 200M. I did add Linux compatibility when prompted, also added SSH login and customized the terminal options to “SWISS” for a slightly better console resolution. I set my timezone appropriately, selected any remaining defaults and reboot the machine. At this point you’ll have a very bare system, so you’ll want to add a few more things. Read more

I have the horrible habit of not putting a label on a CD after I’ve burned it. This leads to having a stack of CDs and not knowing which does what. This was my problem recently when installing FreeBSD, so I decided to start using USB based installations where possible. I prefer the multiple-write capability of USB, and this way I don’t waste CDs. Step one is to download a modified unetbootin utility particularly for FreeBSD. You can get .rpm, .deb, .exe or .sh for both 32 and 64bit here. I went with the 32bit .sh file. BE CAREFUL WITH THE PACKAGED VERSIONS AS IT SEEMS THEY DEFAULT TO WRITING TO YOUR LOCAL DISK! Once you have the unetbootin utility downloaded you’ll want to write the data to your USB drive. This is done using the command: chmod +x unetbootin-freebsd70*.sh ./unetbootin-freebsd70*.sh installmode=usbdrive targetpartition=/dev/sdX1 formatpartition=yes|no Be sure you know which /dev entry your USB drive is connected to and don’t overwrite your existing boot loader on your main disk. Read more