# Newbie - Old laptop



## coverslide (Feb 6, 2010)

I am a new user who wants to give FreeBSD a try. I'm thinking about PC-BSD, but the only computer I have at my disposal is an old 5-year old Compaq Presario 2100, 40GB space, 768 MB RAM. I'm wondering if this would be a problem. Also I don't like having a /PCBSD directory, but I'm not sure if I can deal with FreeBSD just yet. Also, I definitely want wireless working, will the installer be able to help me with this or will I need to do some extra work? I believe it's an old Intel wireless device. I've looked up "wireless FreeBSD" on google and I nearly wet my pants. I had Ubuntu running on it 4 years ago, wireless and all, with no problems, so I'm hoping FreeBSD can do the same without too much trouble. Any suggestions? Thanks


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## DutchDaemon (Feb 6, 2010)

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/


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## fronclynne (Feb 6, 2010)

5 years isn't that terrible, & 40G is plenty of space (if you aren't going to try to build openoffice or java from source).

The trick is going to be your wireless card.  `$ lspci -lv` from a terminal in Ubunutu (I think I remember that right) is your friend.  Once you know the chipset and revision, try googling that +freebsd.

Setting up wireless is a whole lot less point-n-click than Ubunutu, but not much harder.  The handbook is a bit out of date for 8.0:  you need to set up wlan(4) on your interface via /etc/rc.conf and then use your wlan0 just like a normal wireless device.

Also, a healthy wpa_supplicant.conf(5) is quite handy.  wpa_supplicant(8) is useful even for unsecured access points.


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## roddierod (Feb 7, 2010)

I probably could be stoned to death for saying this here  Try OpenBSD...I've got it running on older laptops with less HD space and it detected the wireless during installation and set it up. Of course I don't need flash on this so it may make a difference if you do.


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