Installing FreeBSD on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490CDT

A while ago I installed FreeBSD 5.3 on this Satellite 490CDT, back then I only got X working. This time I had more luck using two discs containing FreeBSD 6.0.

Partitioning Video Sound USB Miscellaneous Attachments

Partitioning

FreeBSD needs a primary partition because it can't cope with (DOS) extended partitions (at least not that I know of). FreeBSD partitions can be created inside this primary partition. When I installed FreeBSD 5.3 I created a swap partition and a system partition, that seemed to work fine. This time I let the installer do the partitioning. It created a 520M root partition, a 520M /tmp partition, a 1.8G /usr partition and a 1.1G /var partition. The system has 39M of swap space.
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Video

Getting X.Org to work wasn't too easy. No configuration file was created yet so I tried Xorg -configure. This completely locked up my laptop (not even keyboard response). If this happens xorgconfig is the way to go. This is a script which is the same as the xf86config that comes with XFree86. Eventually X worked using the VESA driver at a proper 800x600 size. If you would like to look at or use the configuration file that was generated by the script you can find it on the bottom of this page. I was able to select the window manager by creating .xinitrc containing the line exec /usr/X11R6/bin/wmaker in my home directory, or by editing /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc and adding the wmaker command there. Detailed instructions on this and also on getting X loaded during startup can be found here.
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Sound

Getting sound out of this laptop with FreeBSD was easier than I thought. I'm not sure if it really matters, but if you're in doubt about the configuration of your sound card in the BIOS, copy the settings from the picture.

To load the module for the Yamaha OPL3-SAx card use the command kldload snd_mss. Use kldunload snd_mss to unload it again. To have it loaded on startup, add the line snd_mss_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.

I couldn't find XMMS on the FreeBSD 6 installation discs, so I downloaded it from the official website and waited for it compile for an hour, which was apparently worth it. XMMS played mp3 files using the OSS or eSound interface.
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USB

I was able to use a USB mouse in the console and in X without any further effort. My USB stick was also recognised, but I had to find out the FreeBSD way of mounting devices first. The USB port was a SCSI device, these devices start with da in FreeBSD. I needed to mount SCSI disk 0, partition (slice) 1. The FAT32 filesystem seems to be called msdosfs on FreeBSD. In a mount command this information is processed as follows:
mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usb
I also added a line to fstab to make the mounting process easier (see attachments).
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Miscellaneous

• In Window Maker it's possible to set the background using wmsetbg -s -u filename.jpg.
• Shutting the system down is done a little different from the Linux shutdown command. In stead of using -h for halt I had to use shutdown -p now to shutdown and completely power off the system (doesn't happen with -h).

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