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Hi Neil, I had a Inspiron 8000, before I was made redundant :-( Set it up dual boot with win2000 and Redhat 7.1, worked like a dream after some tinkering. I mainly used the articles on http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ as a guide, although it was a pain going through them all sorting the wheat from the chaff. The only issues I had, from memory are: - nVidia drivers for the mobile Geforce 2 chip. This initially had a bug which only allowed X to start once, so I could not use a graphical login. This was fixed later by a straight forward driver update. - Suspend to disk. I set up Redhat by using Partition Magic to re-partion the disk leaving the original suspend to disk partition/file alone. (I was never clear from the Dell documentation and the partition magic, whether this was a distinct partition in its own right or a file residing in the win2000 partition.) Redhat would suspend to disk OK from console, but I seem to remember some problems with doing it from an X desktop. This may have been a result of driver problem above. I did not spend time trying to resolve this as it wasn't something I used very much. - Due to an order error, I ended up with a laptop without a 10/100 network/modem combo card, it just had the modem. So I started using a 3Com PCI x-jack, this caused some initial problems. The PCI service wasn't enabled when eth0 was brought up, so the card/driver delayed initialization, and as a result never came up. This was easily fixed when somebody pointed out the obvious, start the PCI service before eth0, so a quick change to the start order and the problem went away. Modem was the usual win modem, but it did have drivers available on the Internet and I remember getting it working after a bit of a fiddle. I not so sure about the combo card modem chip set. I have a feeling some were supported and some were not, this I would check carefully before ordering. - USB mouse, joystick/touchpad. I could never get these to all work together. It worked fine with just the USB mouse, or fine with just the joystick touched but every time I changed the configuration by hot plugging the mouse, I had to reconfigure the machine. I can't remember now, whether it was just X, or Kudzu got in on the act to. It was fairly easy and quick to do, but was just a pain in the ass. All I really wanted was be able to hot plug the USB mouse or otherwise fall back automatically to the inbuilt joystick/touchpad. I started looking in to this, and I think it can be configured this way, unfortunately I didn't have the machine log enough to sort it out. Other than above the machine was a jem. Heavy and slightly limited battery life, but a real desktop replacement. I had the 1600x1200 UGA screen which was better than my desktop monitor, looking fantastic running KDE2, and gave loads of usable real-estate. One other point worth looking at, Dell supplied memory was extortionate. The 8000 came with an screw access DDR Ram port on the bottom, so you can upgrade the memory without having to take the machine apart. It might be worth costing out ordering a min memory spec machine, and 3rd party DDR memory if you are going for a high memory spec. I'm not sure what this does to the warrenty though. Regards, Justin. PS I'm still looking for a job or contract so if anybody out there needs a software engineer/sysadmin/project manager/consultant/jack of all trades (18 years in the industry does this to a person :-) ) please let me know. No job to big or to small, CV available on request. Neil Stone wrote:
I have been looking at buying a laptop today, these machines are looking quite tempting... http://www.euro.dell.com/countries/uk/enu/dhs/products/series_inspn_notebooks.htm Does anyone have any experiance of installing/running linux on any of this hardware ?? If so pleas let me know your "yays and nays" Cheers -- Neil Stone T: 01392 491293 M: 07866 368318 F: 01392 491293 SELECT * FROM users WHERE (clue != NULL AND clue > 0); 0 returned ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Name: signature.asc signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Description: This is a digitally signed message part
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