Well, I’ve been saying I was going to stick some flavour of Unix onto my laptop for a while now, and yesterday I finally did it. I’ve read about the two releases of PC-BSD, and since I’ve always had Linux before I decided to go with a BSD distribution this time to see what all the fuss was about.

Getting it to like my laptop was fun, I kept getting this message:

acd0: WARNING: SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE transqueue timeout - completing request directly

Except the problem is, it didn’t ‘complete [the] request directly’ it just repeated the message. So after half an hour and still no luck, I started playing. As PC-BSD boots up, it gives you about 2 seconds to hit a key after the kernel modules have loaded before it starts booting the Operating System.

The command ’show’ will show a list of environment variables - this is what was causing my problem:

hw.ata.atapi_dma=1

Changing this to 0 with the command:

set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0

Enabled me to start the operating system. I’ve eventually got my wireless working, although it seems to get disconnected after a while, although that may be my crappy router, which has been on its way out for a while.

This post has actually been written in Konquerer on PC-BSD, so I must have done something right!