pda_h4x0r

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The Inspiron 1000 makes a somewhat decent entry-level linux box. Everything can usually be auto-configured at installation, except for, depending on your distro, three things: video, sound, and power management. I have had to configure these post-installation with Mandriva and Debian so far.

The Inspiron 1000 uses the SiS M650 VGA Display Adapter, which allocates 64MB of system RAM for video RAM. I have found that, regardless of which X server you wish to use (except for, perhaps, Xvesa), it is usually easier to modify the configuration file by hand. On my Inspiron 1000 (on which I use Xorg, and have, in the past, used XFree86), you must modify the configuration file so that X knows to use the "sis" driver (a generic extend VGA driver will also work), enable the DPMS option, set the horizontal refresh rates to 28-49, and set the vertical refresh rates to 43-72. If you are using XFree86, you probably should set the video memory to 64MB as well. At the time of this writing, OpenGL does NOT support direct rendering on the SiS M650 VGA Display Adapter. That means no 3D hardware acceleration :(

To enable sound, you must download and install ALSA and it's dependencies, and run alsaconf. ALSA should be able to recognize the sound hardware without any problems.

For power management, unless you are running an old kernel, I have found it better to enable ACPI than APM in the kernel configuration file, and then either reconfigure or rebuild your kernel.

Overall, if you are still a newbie to the world of Linux (I'm not very far from newbie myself), you may be better off using Ubuntu or Knoppix (I at least know that the LiveCD versions of these distros work without any problems) as your distro, or using another computer altogether. After all, without a good GPU, you won't be using this computer for gaming or intense multimedia functions!