desertstalker

[Log in to get rid of this advertisement]

Knoppix installed and ran fine until I decided that Kernel 2.6.5 was not new enough (weird problems with acpi processor performance states).
After the upgrade the system:
Hung on boot when it started auto configuring devices. (lilo option append="nohwsetup"

Hung on boot when starting PCMCIA (I never use this so I took pcmcia support out of my kernel, I get an error about it not existing but it continues the boot)

/dev filesystem has changed (i cannot figure out how to fix it) there are no /dev/hd?? or /dev/sd?? etc. entries so I had to change the root file system's path to /dev/discs/disc0/part5 (my / partition)

Otherwise:
Userspace program for setting ACPI Performance States: cpuspeed script form http://mega.ist.utl/~jcma/cpuspeed used in conjunction with acpid.

For the media hot-keys I use a program called acme (apt-get install acme). It is a gnome program but works fine under KDE.
i8k utils does not work, the kernel driver never outputs anything.

For my Wireless card (TrueMobile 1300) I use ndiswrapper http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Everything else works fine (when I don't break it fiddling)

EXCEPT (BIG GRIPE)
No acpi suspend or standby. The system goes down for about a second and then comes straight back up again (only succeeds in disassociating my wlan card from the AP)

Hibernate works (sometimes) but is SO SLOW!! much faster to shut the system down and bring it up without hibernating.

Still a solid machine under Linux. Battery life of 3.5 hrs (web browsing, word processing etc.

Zmaster115

Smooth install, fast operation.

It doesn't go to standby easily, though, but shutting down is fast enough.

Wasn't able to find wireless card driver, but had no need for it.

cevans

With considerable tweaking, the system will suspend properly. Use the kernel patches at http://www.loria.fr/~thome/d600/. The acpi script might not work well, so you might need to write a new one. ndiswrapper and tg3 must be removed before suspending, or else the system will crash very strangely - under Debian, leaving ndiswrapper caused many commmands to hang after trying to suspend (sudo, shutdown, etc). These modules can be reloaded after resuming, and will work fine.

With Debian or Ubuntu using XFree86, the system should suspend even when DRI is on since XFree86 is patched. X.org in Ubuntu (Hoary) is not patched, and will not work unless DRI is turned off.

cjcox

I've test most everything except for wireless (lan/modem/dvd/cdrw all work great). I have a friend with a smilar Dell 8600 that uses the same wireless and I know it works for him. Suspend to disk works fine, even with DRI enabled from the open source radeon drivers.

Did have to add a probe for agp-intel... otherwise DRI won't work... but it's minor config issue and was easily fixed.

I'm still tweaking the powersave parameters... cpu frequency changes work, but I'm looking for behavior that works well with the apps I use when on battery. The defaults are a bit too agressive towards the lower clock frequencies.

Dell is making some VERY nice Linux laptops.. if only they cared.

spurious

My employer provided me with this laptop, and I installed Ubuntu on it. I was very impressed: Ubuntu automatically configured the wireless NIC, and automatically setup the grub bootloader to dual-boot with the pre-existing WindowsXP partition.

Ubuntu also automatically detects USB storage devices attached to the Dell D600.

I haven't tried the modem, or burning with the CD-RW drive. But so far I've been using the laptop without any manual configuration at all. I've been very happy with this machine.

Snyke

Installation worked perfectly well, everything has been found and preconfigured.
Wireless card (IPW2200) works fine and I had no problem getting it running.
Suspend to Disk and Standby mode are good, suspend to RAM is buggy but there is no need since S2D is really fast.
Had some performance issues (resmgrd eating up all processor resources) but a killall resmgrd fixes that.

I really enjoy working with this Notebook :)

CoonerTheRed

Overall, smooth installation, pretty darn compatible.

A few things that needed work to make work:

- wireless card, Intel driver was not available initially, now works happily
- acpi - suspend to ram works (and recovers) without hitch after installation of Radeon-Tools and a sleep.sh script. I'm still tweaking power settings for stepping the CPU, laptop-mode, etc, but seems to work decently.