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Re: dual boot on a Dell Latitude C810?



Klaas Gadeyne <Klaas.Gadeyne@mech.kuleuven.ac.be> writes:
> I just received a new Latitude C810.  On my old laptop (a toshiba) I
> had only linux installed.  I'm wondering if I can erase Win2000 (not
> for the refund, but it's the principle that counts :-)) of the
> Latitude without having any problems.  I have in mind two problems
> that could arise
> 
> - Trouble for performing BIOS upgrades (anyone can tell me what BIOS
>   these machines have anyway?)

I believe they have a custom Dell BIOS, which is shared between the
Inspiron and Latitude lines.  Recent 2.4.x kernels include a driver to
access the fan and temperature state in the BIOS; the i8kutils package
in unstable might be useful to you.

> - Trouble for creating the hibernation partition.  I found already on the
> web there was an win executable to create the partition, but those are
> somewhat hard to run under linux...  If the latitude has a phoenix bios
> however, I would use lphdisk to create the partition

My laptop came with the hibernation partition pre-built; I used
Partition Magic to shrink the existing Win2K partition, but if you're
completely eliminating Windows it should be easy enough to keep the
pre-existing partition with fdisk.

> So, would it be wise to just insert my debian bootdisk and fly?

My guess is that you'll have good luck doing that.  :-)

> To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy.
>                 -- MIT Assasination Club

"Assassins' Guild"; to my knowledge, there is no Assassination Club at
MIT, and I've never killed anyone in a Guild game (well, excepting
games whose stated purpose is to kill the maximum number of people in
the minimum amount of time; and I guess I did banish a fair number of
demons in a game five years ago, but divine combat doesn't *really*
count, right?  :-).  http://www.mit.edu/~assassin/

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell



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