I thought I'd give BSD a try, and after a look through, I settled on midnightBSD (It has Gnome. MirOS and OpenBSD where the other ones with it, but midnightBSD won out).

I verified the iso of 0.2.1 i386 release I got, and it said it was alright, and now when I try to boot the installer from it, I hit trouble.

Firstly, in boot modes except Safe Mode, it has problems with an 'acd' device, several times. Then continues, but the problems bother me still.
Secondly - and regardless of what boot options - it finally seems to stick after identifying the CD it's running from, and does nothing at all.

Since I've never even looked at BSD before, I'm not sure if this is just my computer, the fact it can still see the Linux I'm going to overwrite, or what.

If this isn't something I can sort out, then what would people suggest for someone who wants to try BSD, but with Gnome? MirOS and OpenBSD both seem to have it available, which is what I'd prefer.

Thanks, and sorry if I'm overlooking anything here.

MidnightBSD is obscure enough that you might want to tap their specific community for help. Assuming you've carefully read the documentation, try their forums or mailing lists.

Failing that, another option for you may be FreeBSD. If you don't have time to build its gnome port, you can install the gnome binary package(s).

Right, I'm reviving my old topic here, this time with differences.
Firstly, the target BSD of choice is to be either MirOS or OpenBSD. From what I've read, Mir seems to be the more interesting of the two, but on the other hand, I have next to no knowledge of BSD. Hence part of the reason I'm asking here.

Secondly, the target computer is once again a certain old laptop of mine that still has no external media drives of any kind, nor have I got around to having it's USB port fixed. It is, on the other hand, PXE capable, and it's that capability I want to know if I can take advantage of to stuff it with a BSD install.

Thirdly, if another BSD would seem to be more beneficial to me (You're welcome to suggest one) so long as I can get GNOME, Firefox and Dropbox working on there I'm content (the first and last if necessary by self-compilation, but in the case of GNOME I'd prefer it easy-available)

Fourthly, I'm curious to know what BSD's default filesystem type is, and what it's use of EXT2/3/4 is like. EXT3 and 4 have been my favoured system on Linux, but if BSD's own FS (whichever that may be) provides better speed, functionality, etc, then which one is it, exactly?

Fifth and lastly, what I would prefer, if at all possible, is to be able to install and be left with a graphic environment, but what little I've seen of BSD installs suggests there isn't such a thing, so it would be helpful if some kind soul could explain how to go from a fresh install's prompt, to installing a desktop environment.

Whew.
That's about all I got right now. Sorry for making you read all that, but I felt it better to put all in one place.

Don't go with obscure forks, go with a main-line OS. The choices would be FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

You can read the sticky posts at the top of the forum to see what the focus of each one is.