pavgust

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Just to add some comments... was quite an act to get everything the way I wanted it, but in retrospect I have to say that I caused most trouble myself... (/me is a noob, really... deep at heart.. ;))

Unlike the first review of the I8600, mine came with an NVidia graphics card and a screen resolution of 1920x1200. The XFree86 nv driver is capable of dealing with the chipset and resolution in post-Debian Sid versions of XFree, i.e. 4.3.0 (although possibly by now 4.3.0 is the available version in the distribution). www.linux-laptop.net was a great help in figuring out the required modelines. When the new NVidia driver came out, all I had to do was chanve "driver 'nv'" to "driver 'nvidia'", HW acceleration works, I can play foobillard on 1920x1200 max quality with an acceptable framerate :D

(note - read the NVidia driver readme, you can disable the NVidia splash screen... ;))

For the NIC, you will need a kernel upgrade to at least 2.6.x or 2.4.22 (I think), default debian kernels don't recognise it.

People have reported some strange problems with sounds when using the modem at the same time - I haven't been able to verify, as I've never used the modem.

At the moment, there are only 2 things that are lacking in my setup: ACPI suspend support (other ACPI stuff like temperature reading, CPU scaling and battery status work fine), and DPMS suspend support - when I try to enable it, the screen goes black, but the back light isn't turned off. Still working on these.

I'm writing a set of instructions for getting Linux up and running on this model, will post when it's ready. As pointed out above, www.linux-laptop.net has quite a bit of information already.

- P

sharpie

I totally forgot about the (slight) hassle of figuring the modelines until you mentioned it. I searched for a few days trying to find answers, and example scripts. I ended up using the read-edid package, it told me the modelines and everything was hunky dory. Just do a search for read-edid.

Cake

The Inspiron 8600 is an excellent laptop. There seem to be a number of variations - I have the WUXGA (1920x1200) widescreen version with the ATI 9600 graphics card. It has been the first machine on which I have installed and used Linux. Fedora Core was my first distro, and got itself up and running with a minimum of hassle. However, various shortcomings meant most of my time was still spent in Windows. Endless tweaking ensued, culminating in my recently building a Linux system from scratch. There is now nothing more I need, and the the transition to Linux is complete. As far as I can tell from the writings of others, this is one of the more involved systems out there to get fully working, but then the specific hardware problems pale in significance when compared to the time needed to teach oneself about the more general aspects of Linux usage and administration. The various guides catalogued on linux-laptop.net are an excellent resource. Feel free to contact me if seeking assistance with this machine.