FreeBSD 4.5 on a Vaio F808K


I installed the thing by booting from a 4.5 CD and running setup.

I choose a non pcmcia needed install. After install I added
pccard_enable="YES"
pccard_ifconfig="DHCP"
to /etc/rc.conf

There's a realport 2 Xircom network/isdn pcmcia thing in it. To get it to work I had to manually add it to /etc/defaults/pccard.conf. I did this by manually adding the identification string from the card to the config file, and copied the config part from an older realport card. (The identification string can be found in /var/log/messages, and on the console while inserting the card.) (After reading somewhere on the net that this driver also would support newer cards.)
This is how it looks:

#"Xircom"("RealPort2 Ethernet 10/100 Adapter")
card "Xircom" "RealPort2 Ethernet 10/100 Adapter"
config auto "xe" ?
insert /etc/pccard_ether $device start
remove /etc/pccard_ether $device stop

I suppose I can make the isdn part of the card work by doing the same thing. But I dont have/need isdn.

For XFree I had a look at the linux on laptops page. I copied the XF86Config from there. All I did was remarking the
# FontPath "unix/:7100"

line in it. After that made X a symlink in /usr/X11R6/bin to the mach_64 server:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 13 May 4 21:16 X -> ./XF86_Mach64

Ran wmaker.inst, and to my own surprise typing "wmaker" actually started windowmaker.
I did have an earlier strugle with sound on this laptop. I know i've made it too work by recompiling the kernel. But It didnt work great. Think I'm gonna wait for 4.6, and then try again.

Some months later I did install 4.6. Still no sound. What I could find with google more people had this problem. I also found it should work in 5.0. With 4.5 my network connection dropped quit often. With 4.6 it doenst anymore. I decided to install openbsd 3.1-stable. This works with sound. :) Unfortunately now the Xircom doesnt work anymore. Openbsd recognizes it. I see orange lights on my switch. The interface is up. But no working network connection. I think I read reports on succesfull networking with the realport2 and -current. But I dont want to run developers branches of the source tree. So thats why I installed one of the most windows like linux distros (mandrake 9.0) and everything was clickety click configured without me having to do anything. ;-)