RedHat 7.3 Linux on a Dell Inspiron 4150 Laptop

I'm no longer running RedHat 7.3 on this machine. You probably want to read my current writeup but you're welcome to this bit of history!

I'm not much of a Linux guru, but since I haven't seen one of these machines on the Linux Laptop Page I thought I'd put up some information on what I did to get this working. Please do not take any of this as definitive!

Overall I was surprised with how easily everything went. I'm still playing with it, and there's a bunch of stuff I haven't tried, but the machine is mostly working well, though I've been having problems with resume, including display and network problems).

Here's a rough log of what I did to get RedHat Linux 7.3 on this system:

(to end of log)

1. Using the pre-installed Windows XP, "printed" system information onto a "generic printer" via "print to file" and saved the output on another machine. I haven't needed it yet!
2. Installed a 512MB SODIMM from oempcworld.com, part 512M-SO2100. I just used their web memory configurator and got this chip. It seems to work flawlessly. It's tough to install RAM in that tiny memory compartment; I got it stuck the first time by not pushing it hard enough into the slot. In case anybody cares, the sticker on front of the SODIMM says:

   SAMSUNG
   KOREA  0228
   M470L6423CKO-CB0
   

   The sticker on back says:

   M470L6423CKO-CB  0009091  512MB
   

   The printing on the RAM chips says:

   SAMSUNG  226
   K4H510838C-KCB0
   VXE866CA KOREA
   

3. Re-installed windows xp from scratch on a new 10G FAT partition, leaving 28G or so for Linux. There was a small FAT partition in front of the old Win XP partition that I left alone. I assume that's for hibernating, but I haven't tried that yet. Using FAT for my Win XP partition allows me to use fips if I ever want to repartition, and gives me read/write access to the filesystem from Linux. Reinstalling XP meant I wouldn't need PartitionMagic and saved me from a bunch of shovelware.
4. Installed RedHat 7.3 from CD, booted from CD. Chose ATI Radeon 7500 graphic adapter, 1400x1050 resolution, 24-bit color (I got the SXGA+ model). It complained about /boot being too high up (presumably because of the 1023 cylinder BIOS problem), but this BIOS handled it fine. At this point, I have a functioning linux system, with XFree86 humming along just fine.
5. I flailed about randomly to get wireless working. (I have a Linksys BEFW11S4 V.2 wireless NAT router, which I'm not crazy about, as my access point.) In retrospect, getting here was not too hard! It's working now, but I'd still say it's a work in progress.
   • Edited /etc/modules.conf:

     alias eth1 orinoco_cs
     

     I don't think this is doing much good, because it still seems to load the wvlan_cs driver instead.
   • Some of this I adapted from http://brian.salomaki.com/dellx200/:
   • Edit /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia and add the following line at the end

     SCHEME=dreyeroren
     

   • Edited /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts with my own entry:

     dreyeroren,*,*,*)
         ESSID="dreyeroren"
         CHANNEL=6
         (whatever...)
     

   • I still haven't figured out what a mini-PCI wireless card has to do with PCMCIA. There must be some history there, like how every CD-R has to pretend to be SCSI.
6. 2002-09-04: I've been having problems with the LCD whenever it does a resume. The screen gets horribly garbled. I upgraded flash BIOS to version A03. (I think the simplest way to download the bios, if you can create a dos boot disk, is just to get the single .exe file. This one allows you to "downgrade" (e.g. A03 -> A01) and it's quick. I've also been warned against the windows bios upgrade, but it does work for me as long as it's an upgrade.) Unfortunately this BIOS may have cured the LCD power-up problem for Windows XP, but not for linux. The best way I know to deal with this is to type ctrl-alt-F3 (or something) to get out of the X virtual console, then suspend, then resume, then type ctrl-alt-F7 to get back to the X console. But this still doesn't solve the other resume problems. Ideas?
7. Occasionally I see kernel: resume warning: bios doesn't restore PCI state properly in /var/log/messages. Networking tends not to work on resume.
8. 2002-09-16: Downloaded XFree86 From www.xfree86.org. Installation was a snap, including automatic creation of XFree86Config using XFree86 -configure.
9. 2002-09-17: Edited /etc/modules.conf to contain

   alias eth1 orinoco_cs
   

   and edited /etc/pcmcia/config to contain

   # Dell TrueMobile mini-pci adapter
   card "Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps Wireless Adapter"
     manfid 0x0156, 0x0002
   ###  bind "wvlan_cs"
     bind "orinoco_cs"
   

   Not sure it's working any better, but it's definitely using the orinoco_cs driver now. One annoying thing is a bunch of eth1: Null event in orinoco_interrupt! messages on the console, but they seem benign.
10. 2002-09-21: I have the optional DVD/CD-RW drive. I burned my first CD with it. It was frighteningly easy. All the pseudo-SCSI magic had been done by redhat. All I had to do was (as root)

    # cdrecord -scanbus
    ...
    scsibus0:
    	0,0,0	  0) 'HL-DT-ST' 'RW/DVD GCC-4240N' 'D110' Removable CD-ROM
    ...
    

    to determine that the drive's SCSI parameters were 0,0,0. Then I added the following lines to /etc/cdrecord.conf:

    CDR_DEVICE=builtin
    builtin=	0,0,0	8	4m	""
    

    (I'm cheating a bit here; I got the 8 because the web site speed said 24x/10x/24x and I'm conservative, and I got the 4m from watching the output of my first cdrecord -v ....)