Background: Laptop is 2 months old. Its a Toshiba A135-S2266, 512MB of RAM, 1.7Ghz Celeron, 80GB SATA drive, ethernet, wifi, etc... All up to date...

Well I'm getting fed up with my laptop. The first distro I put on it after I bought it 2 months ago was SuSe 10.2 and it ran perfectly. No install or configuration problems. Granted I have run Linux before so I was ready for any potential problems had they popped up.

So wanting now to begin learning *BSD I decided to download FreeBSD and give it a whirl. Downloaded the .iso booted it up and I got a
"OK", I thought. "I should be able to work through this". Posted on this forum and some newsgroups about the problem and got pretty much the same advice. First look through the BIOS and disable any ACPI controls, Boot FreeBSD into SAFE Mode, and boot FreeBSD with ACPI disabled. Well I tried all three and all three failed as well with the same error. There aren't any ACPI option in my BIOS to disable so that doesn't work.

"So," I begin to mumble to myself. "Maybe FreeBSD just doesn't like my laptop". Then I was told to try NetBSD. According to what I have read and what the person told me, "NetBSD runs on everything. Even toasters!". Well, my laptop must *surely* be better than a toaster so this will be a breeze! Uh... No....

Downloaded the .iso, burnt them, and then fired them up. NetBSD loads until I get to the installation screen that tells me to pick a language. Totally freezes after that. Have to hold the power button down on my laptop to poweroff and then reboot.

"Crap!!", I yell out loud scaring the hell out of my dog. *BSD just doesn't want to work for me. Hell with it... I'll download Slack as I have always wanted to play with that.

Downloaded the .iso, burnt them, (anyone seeing a pattern here!), and fired them up. Slack loads up all the way until I have to pick a keyboard mapping (the very first option anyone can do, maybe its where you pick a language, can't quite remember now), then freezes. Same drill, have to hold the power button down in order to turn the laptop off and reboot.


Ugh.. So I'm pretty much at the end of my chain here. Three OS's up and three OS's down in the matter of 1 day. I thought maybe my laptop was burning "frisbees" when I was making the .iso's so I made them on my desktop and those disks have the same effect.

What gives? I have never read anyone having nearly any of these problems installing distros on a laptop. Am I just doomed to continue to run *only* SuSe. Don't get me wrong, I love SuSe! For the beginner, it is a great distro to learn from. But I'm wanting to progress to something a little more stable, less bloated, and more secure. My original goal was to load FreeBSD on my laptop in order to learn it enough to migrate all my servers over from SuSe to FreeBSD. But I can't do that if I can't install it!!

Any thoughts??

This actually may be better suited in the Laptop forum. Forgot there was a laptop forum. If so, please move and accept my apologies...

Maybe try the noapic nolapic boot options with or without the acpi=off option? They have worked for me in the past.
There's a full explanation of the (many) kernel boot options here:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kern...n_pdf/ch09.pdf

-Or-

You could go back to suse 10.2 and see what boot options it chose to make your laptop work.

That is an excellent Idea! SuSe 10.2 boots fine in just normal mode. The menu.lst should hold those setting correct??

Yes, that's where I'd expect to find them.

Here is Grub's menu.lst for booting normal OpenSuSe 10.2:

Nothing really out of the ordinary as far as I can tell. Just a normal boot of that 2.6.18.2-34 kernel....

You are right - a normal boot. But suse must have set up the kernel (or other things) so that it works.

If your install got part way through and then fell over, perhaps it had time to write some relevant information or warnings to /var/log/messages. It would be worth mounting the partition the install(s) were going to, and having a look at that file, or there may even be an install.log somewhere.

Otherwise, perhaps go back to trying combinations of noapic nolapic and acpi=off