2025-02-27
New Puters
We've recently had a sudden influx of computers at the household, thanks to a generous family friend who had more computers on-hand than he knew what to do with. Two laptops and vastly-outdated yet still perfectly good gaming PC. Sormin got the gaming PC, another family friend got the newer, slimmer laptop, and I got this beast:
It's a Dell XPS. Don't know what year, but the sticker on the back says it came with Windows 7, so probably the oldest I have. It has a CD/DVD drive and 2 USB ports, and I haven't looked at the internal specs all that much yet. It had Windows 10 installed but the former owner couldn't remember the password so I replaced it with FreeBSD (we'll get to that).
I know this site is full of talk about how much I love computers, but honestly, I'm not too terribly ecstatic about this one. I've found myself less interested in techy stuff as of late, and my other two computers work just fine for what I need them for, so I'm not sure I'll find much use in it.
That said, I have still found myself configuring and playing with this thing instead of tending to my responsibilities on multiple occasions, so maybe I am still having fun. But why all the configuring, you ask? Well...
Because I Installed FreeBSD
And it Didn't Work Right
[bogger's note: largely inconsequential computer rambling starts here and does not stop]
Okay, well, the fresh install worked right. I had fun looking around the entirely text-based base system, seeing how things were different from Linux, how much smaller the system was, managing and configuring things without things like sudo and (as much) tab-completion which I had grown used to. It was getting the graphical environment working that Didn't Work Right.
The X11 package installed without complaint, but it didn't work out of the box, so I started poking around, testing, configuring. I've been working on it several days now and I've Maybe Almost got it working. I found out this thing has an Nvidia graphics card in it, which I've heard are notorious for not working well on anything but Windows, so that may be the source of my trouble.
Anyway, right now X is running and functioning, just not actually displaying anything. The windows and mouse and everything are there, and they work, but nothing shows on the laptop screen. It shows up right on an external screen through the HDMI port, no trouble at all, just not on the laptop screen. Kinda frustrating, more confusing.
I don't want to give up on getting it to work, and I can probably find a solution pretty quickly online, but that's not really a priority for me right now. I mean, not that I have much else going on right now, but that's a bigger topic for a different Bog post.
Back home