RedHat 8.0 Linux on a Dell Inspiron 4150 Laptop

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.

(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 think that's a hack Dell uses to store windows boot stuff, but I just ignore it. 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. But I'd skip that and go straight to RedHat 8.0.
5. Ftp'd the iso images of RedHat 8.0 (psyche) onto a desktop machine. Burned just disk 1 and booted the laptop from it. (By hitting F12 during the memory check, I was able to tell it to boot from CD just this once without changing the BIOS setup.)
6. At the boot prompt, I said linux askmethod which allowed me to select an NFS boot (it autodetected the mini-PCI ethernet card). Selected "Alps Glidepoint" as the closest mouse. (Is it?) Chose ATI Radeon 7500 graphic adapter, 1400x1050 resolution, 24-bit color (this is the SXGA+ model, YMMV). It complained about /boot being too high up (presumably because of the 1023 cylinder BIOS problem), but this BIOS handled it fine. When I got to package selection, I chose "custom". You have to be careful here. You'll see a lot of packages checked but the checks do not mean everything in those packages will be installed! You have to click details on each package to make sure you get what you want.
7. At this point, I had a functioning linux system, with XFree86 humming along just fine. I did not have to edit XF86Config at all.
8. Wireless was much easier in 8.0! I have the internal mini-PCI "Dell TrueMobile 1150" wireless card. Here is the cardctl ident output and the lspci output that may help you determine whether you have this card (actually a PCMCIA card plus a PCI-PCMCIA bridge) as opposed to the newer Dell TrueMobile 1180, which is native PCI, but which at this writing may not yet be supported by the orinoco driver.) The network configuration tool (system settings / network menu) it only showed eth0, the wired ethernet card. But under the add button, there's a wireless connection choice. At that point I was given a choice between Lucent Orinoco and Prism II-based PCMCIA wireless (eth1) and other. I chose the former.
9. But it was still using the out-of-favor wvlan_cs driver. To get it to use the preferred orinoco_cs driver, I did the following:
   • Added to /etc/modules.conf:

     alias eth1 orinoco_cs
     

   • Edited the Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps Wireless Adapter entry in /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"
     

10. I have the optional DVD/CD-RW drive. It was frighteningly easy to configure for burning. 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=removable
    removable=	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 ....)
11. There's a BIOS setting on the power management page for "Smart CPU Mode" which comes with a warning: "When this option is set to DISABLED, the CPU runs at maximum speed and may affect thermal control and battery performance." I discovered that you should take this warning seriously, at least as far as heat goes. My advice is to leave it enabled. It appears that Linux does the right magic to tell the machine when it's idle and when it's not.

I also have been having network problems with resume. Here's some dmesg output. I haven't spent much time with this yet.

Cool Stuff

Flexible bay

I never saw it documented, but the bay that usually holds the floppy or DVD/CDRW can also hold a second battery. This brings my battery life, with very little APM enabled (see above) to something like 6 1/2 hours. Too bad I no longer routinely fly coast-to-coast!

I'd love to know the rules about when I can swap stuff in that bay.

Links

• linux-dell-laptops group

Last modified: 2002-11-07