Vim Visual wrote: > I cannot afford to have a non-functional (I know this is an > exaggerated statement) production laptop for longer than, say, a few > hours. As a matter of fact I am reinstalling GNU/Linux right now > because I HAVE to work this evening (the installation and set up takes > ~20 min)
You should always verify that everything works, before taking any machine into production. :) As others have already said, a separate partition for OpenBSD is a good way to get started. > 1- Why should I give gcc the path to io.h? (and where is it, btw, a > locate will be random in my case because I do not know what io.h is) > In GNU/Linux I don't have to do it and seemingly the folks of > FreeBSD/NetBSD neither. Does it depend on the gcc version? If you don't know what the problem is, you should not be the one trying to fix it. :) > 2- Another BIG problem for me is that apm does not work. I NEED apm As far as can be seen from your previously posted dmesg, your laptop doesn't support apm at all, only acpi. Please complain to your laptop manufacturer about it. We see this all the time with newer machines, vendors don't bother to test anything but Windows these days. If all goes well, acpi support will probably make it into OpenBSD 4.1, and there are already some snapshots with partial acpi support on the ftp site. But please don't count on this to work perfectly, it's still in development. > 1- I need wlan connection (guess it'll work just as it's working on > this one, same chipset) It's an Intel 2200BG, which works, if you accept Intel's weird licensing policies for their firmware. > 2- I need the full screen resolution As I asked you before: post the exact command lines you were using with 915resolution, and the exact error messages which prevented it from working. We would rather have a chance to fix the 915resolution port, if it somehow didn't work on your machine, than try to get some weird Linux-only program running. > 3- I need apm working Try looking for a BIOS update from your vendor, complain to your vendor about dropping support for established standards, or try a snapshot with acpi support enabled (but DON'T expect everything to work in this case!).