Fedora Core 1 and RedHat Linux 9 on a Dell Inspiron 4150 Laptop

I'm not much of a Linux guru, but 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!

I've edited history a little bit because I've actually installed a few older RedHat versions, including RedHat 7.3 and RedHat 8.0. For simplicity, this is written as if I had started out with Fedora Core 1. Differences between Fedora Core 1 and RedHat 9 are minor and are noted in the text.

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. I ordered mine with minimal RAM (128M) and 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. In the past I've also had very good luck buying memory from Crucial, but they didn't have the 512M part when I was looking.

   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. If you are at all nervous about taking apart your expensive and fragile laptop, consider ordering yours from Dell with all the RAM you want (and paying Dell's premium) or having a pro install your 3rd-party RAM.

   In case anybody cares, here are the RAM chip details.

3. Unfortunately I occasionally need Windows XP. So I 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. Ftp'd the iso images of Fedora Core 1 (yarrow) [previously did the same with RedHat 9 (shrike)] onto a desktop machine, burned them, and booted the laptop from disk 1. (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. This is a trivial, but really nice, feature I haven't seen before.)

5. This time I did a CD install; previously I've also used 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. In the past, 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. This time I was lazy so I just said, "everything".

6. At this point, I had a functioning linux system, with XFree86 humming along just fine. I did not have to edit XF86Config at all.

7. Wireless was easy. I have the older 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) 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.

   It installed the preferred orinoco_cs driver, which made life easier than with previous RedHat versions.

8. 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 ....)

9. 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.

10. At this point, things were going great except for a few problems: Clock drift, strange APM problems with suspend/resume, and horribly garbled screen after unblanking [The garbled screen problem seems to have been fixed with Fedora Core 1 even though the XFree86 version is the same as in RedHat 9.]

    Thanks to a message from n8gray@c... on the linux-dell-laptops group, I downloaded and flashed BIOS version A06 from Dell's web site. This solved the clock drift and APM problems with suspend/resume.

11. [This step is not necessary with Fedora Core 1. If you are using RedHat 9, read on...] Also thanks to that message, I downloaded the latest experimental XFree86 Radeon driver (radeon_drv.o) and XFree86 binary. I found these files, and simple instructions, on http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/. This solved the garbled screen after screen unblanking problem. Presumably these fixes have been incorporated into XFree86 4.4.0, but I haven't checked.

    Together, these last two fixes allow me to blank the screen (e.g. with Fn+D) or suspend (e.g. with Fn+Esc) at will. I was also able to set the BIOS to suspend when the cover is closed, and all is ok when I open the cover.

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Last modified: 2003-09-06