Re: dell inspiron 8000
Hi,
you are lucky to have one of the most linux-friendly laptops at all!
I have an Inspiron 8000 as well, and absolutely everything works
including XFree86-4 (with Gnome 1.4 and KDE2), sound,
high-resolution console with VESA framebuffer (and working SVGAlib
apps incl. zgv!), usb, firewire, pcmcia, irda, microphone, internal
cd-burner (with SCSI-emulation), touchpad AND trackstick, all
special keys etc. It is really sweet and worth the effort!
I also have a MiniPCI Ethernet/Modem CombiCard. The Ethernet part
worked out of the box, and the WinModem runs with the ltmodem linux
driver for winmodems with Lucent chip. But watch out: Dell ships two
different models of such cards without telling you which one you
get: I have the Actiontec card and it works; but if you should have
the 3Com card you will not get the internal modem working.
I run Debian unstable with Kernel 2.4.3 and XFree86-4.0.2. Sound
works with the experimental OSS driver in Kernel 2.4.x.
All data partitions are running with ReiserFS, the bootloader is
GRUB, and the printer server is CUPS.
Of course you have to compile a custom kernel to get all hardware
supported. If you compile a kernel with hotplug and pcmcia support
you will get a kernel panic during booting! To avoid this you have
to build your own pcmcia-cs packages from the Debian sources, with
the Configure-option --pnp. To get SVGAlib working you have to
recompile the SVGAlib packages with the setting MAX_REGS on 15000 in
driver.h.
If you should not know how to do all this, I could send you all
these binary packages as email attachments. I can also send you any
conffiles you may need (e.g. for XFree, SVGAlib, kernel
configuration, GRUB, etc.).
Just let me know what you need. Of course you should be able
yourself to install a very basic Debian system from the Potato CDs
and/or web (via external modem), at least in console mode (without
complete hardware support).
Cheers,
Guenter
--
Linux: Who needs GATES in a world without fences?
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