After all the troubles described below, I decided to try to install freeBSD.
Since my laptop does not have a CD player I tried to install it over a serial cable connected to my other laptop, which does have a CD player. The laptop with the CD player runs Windows 98, which does not support this kind of connections. Therefore I booted it from my muLinux floppy and entered the basic configuration details. Funny how an operating system on a simple floppy disk can accomplish many things I cannot do with a 100+ Mb Windows installation.
Before this I already prepared two freeBSD boot disks to start up the setup procedure. I booted my laptop from the first disk, inserted the second disk when prompted, hit enter to start the setup program, and… reboot!
Time to read the manual (I know, I should have done that part before). Tried the same thing again, this time with the boot -h option, but with the same result. Mmmm… Maybe my floppies are corrupt, since I do remember having some troubles creating them. So I enter them in the other laptop, and they function perfectly…
I guess I’ll have to do some more reading. One of the things I am thinking of is that my old laptop does not have a lot of memory, so maybe it is not able to contain the whole setup program.
