This isn't the best laptop on which to run Linux, but necessity is the mother of invention and since I've owned it the hardware support has become very comfortable. I havn't found out all the answers, but here are my most frequently asked questions.
<simon@urbanmyth.org>As of Jan 2002 things are looking bright for hardware support; all the components have open source drivers available.
A remark about warrantees, the notebook was bought in June 2000 - in December 2001 the keyboard failed, in February 2002 the harddrive failed, in March the battery failed, in April the keyboard failed again and in May the buttons fell off the glidepad. I admit I work computers hard but that's silly ;)
BANG! Motherboard failed in July whilst in America - replaced with another which went again almost immediately. DellUSA figured it was a short against the screening and changed the case and motherboard, it failed again and work wrote the laptop off...
It works like this; normally the system boots through the MBR, picks the Linux partition (because it is flagged active) and boots Lilo from there doing all the usual Lilo things. When the system is placed in hibernation the system state is written into the S2D partition which is then flagged active. On the resume the system boots as normal but this time the S2D partition is selected, the system is restored from that data and the active flag reset on the linux partition.
Dangerous: please note this is rather dangerous, I rebooted my machine once and it found a month old S2D image, restored it and trashed my filesystems. After that I destroyed the S2D partition and stopped using it.
The CPU, motherboard, memory and harddisk are common system components and should work with most distributions. The first area people are likely to have problems is the graphics, that is the ATI chipset and the LCD screen.
The ATI chipset has some issues with XFree86 v3 (it doesn't work or has artifacts) but works fine with v4. If you have trouble installing your distribution in graphical mode try the text fallback. Distributions started using XFree86 v4 during the summer of 2000, I'd recommend that people use one of those rather than struggling with the old XFree. If you really have to, there is a patched XFree86 v3.3.6 X server available, you can download it from http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~steveh/inspiron/x_method1.html
Here are copies of my XFree86 4.1.0 configuration files, they aren't heavily customised.
LCD projectors have caused me a lot of grief, with cheap ones (sub £3000 :) the default text console does not produce a stable picture and XFree86-v3 was really unreliable. VERITAS finally bought a decent projector and it now all works perfectly, so your milage may vary.
Mikael Carneholm pointed me at a wonderful utility that lets you control the various graphics outputs (lcd, vga and tvout) and use multiple outputs at the same time - excellent! http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/lennart/projects/atitvout
On the console front, last time I tried (2.4.[0-7]) the ATY framebuffer didn't work, things have probably changed in the last year but I havn't felt the need to look. The non accelerated VESA framebuffer would probably work, but it's not worthwhile suffering it.
The sound chip used in this notebook is very capable, Zach Brown has produced an open source driver (Dec 2000) which has been integrated into the official Linux kernel tree. His web site detailing the work is at http://www.zabbo.net/maestro3/.
OSS do a binary only driver, I bought it but have been using the open source driver since it became available.
APM features on this notebook have been troublesome, The notebook will not suspend whilst in XFree86 3, it just locks up. To work around this problem change to the console before suspending the machine. XFree86 v4 has no such problems and with the S2D features detailed above and a recent Linux kernel it should be okay.
I mentioned I used the Dell tool for formatting the suspend to disk partition, at the time the open source tool lphdisk didn't work with this machine but it may do in the future.
TIP: If on APM resume you just get a blank screen, pressing Fn-F5 and exiting out of the help screen will often revive the system.
Recent kernels have support for the Dell BIOS, with the appropriate tools you can get at things like the bios version, fan speeds, serial number and introduce handlers for the volume buttons. http://people.debian.org/~dz/i8k/
The Xircom net/modem combo pccard is supported in the pcmcia-cs package and there is a kernel module present in 2.4 kernel source, though you still need the userspace utilities. I use the pcmcia-cs drivers with both 2.2 and 2.4 kernels as it simplifies my setup. The latest source for this is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcmcia-cs/
It should be no surprises that the 3Com nic works flawlessly with pretty much any kernel, it does exactly what it says on the box so I guess you get what you pay for.
A Gold WaveLAN card from Lucent (now renamed Orinoco) was quite simple to configure, the 2.4 kernel has a driver but I use the one in the pcmcia-cs package since you require the pccard utiities and I had it installed anyway. Build a driver, configure your network in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts (I had it rigged to load as eth0 and share network config with the xircom/dock nic). You need the wireless tools http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html if you want to use encryption (and it has some useful diagnostic tools).
The DVD operates happily as a cdrom, you'll need some additional software to perform unlocking of DVD disks as well as the UDF filesystem available in your kernel. Of course, unlocking the disk and getting at the files doesn't mean you can place movies unless you have a mpeg player. You should review the software yourself on http://linuxvideo.org/
Or, go hunting around the links from http://xine.sourceforge.net to find a patched version that can play encrypted DVDs. A very good player.
I setup the irda for use with a Palm3 recently, I recommend people read through the Linux IRDA-HOWTO but for serial port emulation you need to configure the bios to have the infrared port on a serial line (COM2 in my case) and the kernel to include the relevant modules (irtty and irda), you need the userspace utilities from http://irda.sourceforge.net/.
I don't make use of the USB hardware present in this notebook though I have played with it in the past. If anyone wants help with this better email me 8)
I have port replicators and true docking stations for this notebook, but I don't use them from day to day. They work fine if you plug them in and then boot linux and shutting down before undocking, the kernel had some problems viewing the 3Com ethernet card past the dock's pci bridge but I believe this has been resolved. Undocking the notebook whilst still running is asking for trouble as it suddenly looses contact to devices on it's pci bus.
Other places to look for information...
| Urbanmyth.org | Contact: simon(a)urbanmyth.org |