Anyone have experience installing this OS on a Dell Latitude CPi 266 laptop? I try to do it via the bootable CD; the CD boots, but after a minute the kernel panics and prompts me to reboot. Anyone had success installing this OS on this make of laptop? Thanks.

I know you have your resons for wonting this o/s and I can't argue with you. Because I myself have a lot of fun with diffrent o/s. But if what you are looking for is a non bill type O/S that has a chance of running pcmi. then IMHO you need to look at mandraken or red hat. They have both come a long way in the last couple of years.

Will do, I just DL'd the latest Mandrake build and will try it. I like FreeBSD and have installed it successfully on desktops before but never on a laptop as yet. It's nice because unlike redhat a lot of stuff is already disabled, whereas redhat seems to start with most everything enabled security-wise. Anyway will give Mandrake a try, thanks. :D

Check the hardware list: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.1R/hardware-i386.html Linux doesn't support that much more than FreeBSD 5.x. I say it's worth a try if you like BSD. I couldn't even get 5.0 to boot on my Compaq Armada e500, but I doubt you'll encounter the same bug. If it doesn't work, install Slackware. BSD users generally like Slackware, Gentoo, and Debian, rather than Mandrake, RedHat, and SuSE. Slackware has BSD-style init and libraries to improve your chances of compiling unmodified BSD code. Gentoo has "portage", which with one simple command compiles your program from source, handling all dependencies. Both, and Debian as well, are much less bloated and are generally more "traditional" than RedHat/SuSE-like distributions.