I didn't know if anyone would be interested in my experiences as many many people have installed debian on Dell 8200s before, but I thought I would share my experience. I would describe myself as fairly knowledgable about linux... I first installed RedHat 4.2 on a gateway desktop I got in 1997, and have since installed debian woody on my home and work desktops. I bought a dell inspiron 8200 about 2 years ago and considered several times installing debian, but I didn't because of the Nvidia video driver issue and the fact that cygwin was working reasonably well for me. My laptop crashed about once a week and two weeks ago it crashed three times in the same day, so I decided to try the new debian installer for sarge. First, I used Belarc Advisor (a free as in beer, not freedom tool) to get a profile on the laptop... it generates a good system report. You can get the tool from http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html . It was mostly an unnecessary step, but it came in handy when I was trying to remember what video driver I had been using. The sarge installer was very good... the only stumbling block for me was the partitioning tool... I found it slightly unintuative to use. The defaults it uses are fairly good and not insane like Dell's preinstalled linux partitioning under RedHat (2.5 Gig for /home on a 50 gig hard drive?) I went for the simplest package selection scheme available, and if I had it to do over again I might just start by installing linux standard base and then adding more as I needed it, but as it was I selected several categories and installed a bunch of things. I ran into a couple of things which newer users might have found frustrating after installing sarge: 1. X wouldn't work because I needed to install nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-*, so I used apt-get to install them, but they are in non-free and non-free wasn't included in /etc/apt/sources.list by default. I added non-free loaded the nvidia drivers and X started up beautifully. 2. I wanted to try gnome... I started using X in the early 90s on a Sparc, and picked twm as the window manager I would use... I have spent the last 12 years perfecting my .twmrc file, so I thought it might be a good time to take a step into the new millenium and try gnome. I had gnome-session 2.4.2-2 installed, and gdm running, but gnome was not an option from the login screen. I tried updating and upgrading the system, but gnome-session 2.4.2-2 was held back from upgrading... I did a reinstall of gnome-session and 2.4.2-4 was installed. That did the trick and added gnome. I have since returned to using twm... Gnome looks great, but I am a lazy bastard. I'm sure point 2 will work fine once sarge becomes the stable release, but I was a bit confused. Everything that came with the laptop is working fine... better than it was when running Windows (not a single crash since the install). I have also connected my ipod and used GNUpod with it (it worked well, but I corrupted my itunes db... it pays to read documentation). I also connected a digital handycam and can read images and movies off the memory stick, though streaming audio and video are still inaccesible. I like the new installer and think if the partitioning section gets some more instructions or just becomes easier to manipulate then it will be great. The one thing I have not managed to get running is my D-LINK DWL-650+ pcmcia wireless card. It has an acx100 chip, for which a driver exists (acx100.sourceforge.net), but I have not managed to compile it. Anyway, if anyone has any detailed questions let me know... there are many sites out there that deal with installing linux on dell 8200s and some of them were usefull... some even deal specifically with installing debian... it seems that as time goes by linux is getting easier to install. Chris -- Christopher H. De Vries Phone: (617) 496-7636 Postdoctoral Fellow FAX: (617) 495-7345 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics email: cdevries@cfa.harvard.edu 60 Garden Street MS-42 Cambridge, MA 02138 cfa-www.harvard.edu/~cdevries/
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