Installing FreeBSD on Parallels

To get networking to work, don't use ipv6.

Xorg settings: Use pcm0 for the mouse driver, sysmouse won't work with the trackpad. Use the default keyboard model (not macbook) vesa for the video card driver. Fullscreen mode is 1280x800

xmonad: Works fine, remember to get xmonad-contrib. xmobar works, but won't be able to get cpu/mem/etc info from /proc. Haven't tried dzen2 yet.

I wonder if I can get a smaller image size if I use a different disk partition. ~5GB for a minimalistic install seems a bit much.

VMWare vs Parallels - It's not about the speed

There's plenty of VMWare vs. Parallels comparisons, but none yet that covers the most important thing for me in a virtual machine: How much of a pain in the neck is it to install something that's not Windows, onto a non-default VM? In my case, Parallels wins that one.

Screen resolution

GDM doesn't like to play nice with /etc/X11/xorg.conf . It insists on using a different resolution, which is annoying when one doesn't want to use the Gnome control center. Enter xrandr:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024

Now all I have to figure out is how to re-enable the laptop screen with the external monitor plugged in.

xmonad mystery mending

I had been baffled because on the machines where I had set up xmonad I could not get the alleged exit keystrokes (Mod+shift+Q) to work. Turns out, it was a remnant from when I had experimented with using xmonad instead of Metacity in Gnome. Changing the main method in ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs from gnomeConfig to defaultConfig fixed that.