I will be posting my personal experience installing FreedBSD on my Dell Inspiron 6000. Hopefully it will be useful for everyone, not just those attempting to install FreeBSD on the same (or similar) laptop. I will show, in as much detail as I can, how I built my FreeBSD system from the bootonly disk into a full-fledged, multimedia-capable machine, with all of the programs that I currently use/run.
I will also post any useful (at least to me!) *BSD links, as well as information on and/or experiences with other members of the *BSD Family, although my main interest and focus is FreeBSD. Many thanks to Michael R.M. David, author of the excellent PC-BSD Guide (which is also very useful for any FreeBSD user!) which I have used/referenced many times since it first appeared on the web (link to the right: Michael-and-Mary's Site).
marleyfan68
Stage 1 Guide: This will guide you through installation (I used the bootonly disk;available at http://www.freebsd.org), syncing with the RELENG_6_0 branch,upgrading all currently installed ports/packages, and updating the base system.
Stage 2 Guide: This will guide you through installing iwi-firmware, KDE, Firefox, Gaim, Linux Base, and JDK15 (java). At this stage, I have now rebooted into my installed, synced, and updated FreeBSD RELENG_6_0 laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000), and logged in as the non-root user I created during Stage 1.
Adventures in FreeBSD 