Re: linux on dell inspiron 4150

[William Enck <wenck@psu.edu>]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 06:33:58PM +0100, Samuel Desseaux wrote:
> Hi everybody!!
> 
> I've just bought my laptop: a dell inspiron and i 'm very impatient to install 
> debian ( i don't want to see any more windows...). Who have ever installed 
> debian on this machine? have you met some problems? If you have experience on 
> 4150 (or 4100), write me!!

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~me/linux/dell_inspiron_4150.html

Is a good page that I found. I installed redhat, gentoo, and finally
debian unstable on my 4150. Some common problems you most likely will
encounter:

Coming out of suspend, the laptop thinks the cpu temperature is 85, and
the fan will stay on. Hit Fn-z and it will force a reload of bios
readings.

After a screen blank (simulated by Fn-d) the screen will be come
garbled. This seems to be a problem with the bios. Therefore, you might
want to disable screen blanking as much as you can in the bios settings.
If you do blank the screen, you can do the following to recover without
doing a hard reboot:

Bios A01 (when screen is garbled):
Ctl-Alt-F1
Fn-d
<press key to activate screen>
virtual console is back up cleanly so Alt-F7 and you are back to X

Bios A03 (when screen is garbled): damn them for the changes
Fn-F3 (any bios status will do, this is the batt stat screen)
Esc (screen will now become blank)
Fn-Esc (suspends the machine)
Turn it back on with power button and X is back

The above for A03 worked for me consistantly before, but now it doesn't
seem to be doing so. Hopefully Dell will put out another revision that
fixes this. Maybe someone else out there has found something to work,
I'd love to hear it.

Read the above page for installing helpful things such as i8kutils. I
found that making a /etc/i8kbuttons (read the man page for settings).
There is an init script that starts i8kbuttons for you, very nice,
because then the volume Fn keys work.

Hope this was helpful.

-- 
William Enck
wenck@psu.edu