[GLLUG] Windows 2K and OpenBSD playing nice together

[Clay Dowling]

Thought I'd share this story of Windows and UNIX playing well together,
just to remind folks that Redmond isn't entirely evil.

My Sony laptop and UNIX haven't gotten along very well together.  Ubuntu
was a complete non-starter on it, usually managing to lock up during the
install or the initial boot.  So on Monday I decided to put OpenBSD on it,
since there is very little hardware that OpenBSD won't run on.  X-Windows
on this laptop has always been a pain because X can't correctly probe the
monitor's display frequencies and there isn't a lot of documentation
available on the correct frequencies.

The OpenBSD install went flawlessly, about as trouble-free as you can
expect from any installation, and smoother than Windows 2000 (which wasn't
bad).  After some futzing around with X I finally fired up xorgconfig,
which set up some reasonable defaults for my video setup, but wasn't
giving me full screen access.  A little research found a better hsynch
setting for my machine, and suddenly I had X at the full resolution.

The final problem was that of a boot manager.  OpenBSD doesn't ship with
one.  Fortunately, Windows 2000 does.  The OpenBSD FAQ entry for
multi-booting gave pretty decent instructions for using NTLDR (the Win2k
book manager), and it was pretty trouble-free to get it running.

Finally, I installed fluxbox, since I've had good luck with it in the past
and I don't really make use of all the cool features that Gnome or KDE
offer.

The result is that I've got a very nice laptop that can boot two different
operating systems, and once I hit on the right combination it was very
easy to get going.  If any of you out there are having trouble with
getting Linux up and running on your laptop, take a look at installing
OpenBSD.  It isn't as pretty as Linux, but it's definitely more
trouble-free.

Clay
-- 
Simple Content Management
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