you must have followed the wrong links or not read which post to reference. i just followed the link and they're all still there--i even downloaded a couple again to make sure. check again, make sure you look for comment #49. s/he's the person who posted them on megaupload. good luck.

I don't run ubuntu, so if you need help there, ask someone other than me but if you are going to do some things manually (and this should all work in ubuntu anyway I think) you can try the following:

if you need wireless drivers/ucode/daemon, you'll find it at:

http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net

if you are going to manually set up ipw3045 as per the instructions at http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/INSTALL
make sure you also modprobe the following modules:

modprobe ieee80211
modprobe ieee80211_crypt
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_wep
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_ccmp
modprobe aes_i586
modprobe arc4
modprobe michael_mic
modprobe crc32c

...if you enable those above, you will have support for everything you would need for wpa_supplicant as well as wep enncryption.

if you need everything else you should need should be in the kernel. I did find a rather tricky workaround to get sound working, if you need that I will post it. regarding video, you'll get best luck with driver="vesa" in your xorg.conf until the newer kernels have the intel driver as an option. (same with sound actually)

As for sound, if you have ubuntu, like I said before... But what you can also do is what I did to get it working. I found it at another site, so I will simply paste it here because it worked:
<blockquote>
I found this fix from the Ubuntu kernel team forums:
http://www.nabble.com/Dell-Inspiron-...p11256030.html
I manually edited my /usr/src/linux/sound/pci/hda/patch_sigmatel.c file to add the
PCI_VENDOR_ID_DELL line (on line 686) shown below:

static struct snd_pci_quirk stac927x_cfg_tbl[] = {
...
SND_PCI_QUIRK(PCI_VENDOR_ID_INTEL, 0x2001, "Intel D965", STAC_D965_3ST),
SND_PCI_QUIRK(PCI_VENDOR_ID_DELL, 0x01f3, "Dell 1420", STAC_D965_3ST),
/* Added for Dell Inspiron 1420 support */
/* 965 based 5 stack systems */

I recompiled my kernel modules, rebooted, unmuted the speaker, and it worked. It also works compiled into the kernel (not as a module). This is with kernel 2.6.21-gentoo-r4 and on a Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop. The sound card in question is an HDA-Intel (ICH8) SigmaTel STAC9228.
</blockquote>

...But for my system, I also had to make it work while running since I didn't want to reboot like the guy above, so I did:

telinit run alsa stop &&
rm /etc/asound.state &&
modprobe -r snd-hda-intel &&
modprobe snd-hda-intel &&
telinit run alsa start &&
alsamixer
...I unmuted my mixer settings, and enjoyed a song.

Don't worry too much about this hardware we have. There are manual workarounds for all of it, and mainstream distro coverage will come soon enough. Dell had to make some hacks to get it all working.

good luck, hang in there. this is a good laptop, and will get better with time as support increases.

If you want to know if you have the modules for the dvd drive, you can try this at root prompt;

grep PIIX /usr/src/linux/.config
...and/or
modprobe --list | grep piix
...if it's in there, you can:
modprobe piix

If you need battery settings for your gkrellm or whatever, you can:

modprobe battery

...hmm, I can't think of anything else right now. Hope this helps someone. Worked for me.

Update:

I wiped Vista from the hard drive, repartitioned it, and installed XP. Next, I put PCLinuxOS 2007 on it, and spent a few hours trying to make the ethernet work before giving up in disgust. I tried multiple times to put in a tg3 file that would enable the ethernet controller, but all to no avail.

Besides the people who have posted in their experiences with Ubuntu on the 1420, is there anyone else who has had any experience getting Linux on these machines? If there is someone who has been able to install Linux on one without too much hassle, I would love to hear about it before I dive into getting a *buntu distro on it.

Thanks very much.

why you don't try opensuse 10.2?! it works perfectly on my new thinkpad r61... the wireless 3945/4965 is brand new but working with the iwlwifi project. opensuse in the factory build also has a kernel 2.6.22.5 and kernel-module incl. firmware for these wireless cards... works pretty well and without any "console" stuff... forget ndiswrapper...*g all the other hardware incl. nvidia 3d etc. is working well...

try it!!

Really? I had heard that other people had had problems with 10.2 running on similar hardware. Have you had any problems with screen resolution and ethernet controller?

Thanks.

no, not any problems with display and resolution due to the fact that there is the latest nvidia driver. for sure you have to install it after the initial opensuse install which only provides 1024x768 resolution with the nv driver (or vesa?, I don't remember...). anyway, graphics works very well. suspend is another issue. due to the nvidia install I never checked if suspend works out of the box, but with the 3d nvidia driver it does not, neither s2ram nor s2disk. so let's wait and see...*g

eth0 is recognized during install (did a net install!). wireless is intel4965n. ndiswrapper worked ok, but had problems. now I am typing this with the iwlwifi-1.0.0 driver directly from intel, everything fine.

as a resumee, opensuse did it, only the latest hardware (nvidia quadro nvs 140m and intel4965n) did not work out of the box... but tell me any distro managing that...

I have the Intel X3100 graphics chipset, which has been reported to be troublesome with some Linux distros. If this works OK, then I'll give it a shot.

I have heard good things about the 10.3 betas; do you have any impressions of them? Probably won't go for any of them now, but if it looks like 10.3 will be the one to beat, then I'll wait until it releases in October and go for it then.

I couldn't install 10.3 beta1 due to some problem with yast, the package managing tool of opensuse. not wondering since the whole yast thing is broken or not working stable since 10.0... but I also heard a lot of good things. Also a preliminary version of KDE4 is included in 10.3 which is installed in parallel to kde 3.5.7 to avoid conflicts since kde4 is not working yet...

the problem with intels x3100 is that in opensuse 10.2 you have to compile the driver on your own. if you wait until october or try the beta of opensuse 10.3 it will work out of the box...

Setlew, if you want to put any errors you are getting into the forum here it might help. If you want to email me with any direct questions I can try to help you that way too since we are on the same hardware, briareus at gmail dot youknowwhat. As for the troubles with the drivers and whatnot, this is improving with new kernel releases. I can help you with step by step networking instructions via email or here, whichever you prefer.

I'll now ask you some direct questions:

Did you load the tg3 driver with: modprobe tg3

If it doesn't load (if it can't be found, then you will want to enable it in the kernel. I can walk you through that if needed, the driver is listed in the driver section as "Broadcom Tigon3 driver").

If it is loaded (you can see it with lsmod), are you not able to find an ip? Is your network service running? After loading the tg3 modules, some commands you can try in various distros to start the network are:

telinit run network restart

/etc/init.d/networking restart

service network start

...if your service is running and you then need to get an ip, you can start it with one of these commands:

dhcpcd eth0 -t 0 [the -t 0 makes it try forever]

dhclient eth0

or in many systems you can: ifup eth0

...the above assume eth0 is your lan device, check yours with ifconfig. Substitute eth1 or eth2 whatever needed. I provide all these manual commands because personally I don't trust guis, and I like to see the actual error output in the terminal. If you execute these and you need to undo/redo them, well you can:

rm /var/run/dhcpcd-*some*PID*number

ifdown eth0

...Anyway you might already know all this, but I hope it helps.

briareus:

Thanks for the help. I "think" the module tg3 was loaded; at least, it showed up when I ran lsmod, although it had a value of 0 next to it, indicating that it was not being used (according to the rest of the output). I ran dhclient eth1 for my ethernet controller, and got the following output:

How do I activate the new tg3 module?
Thanks,
Setlew.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'how to enable the new tg3'. Seeing tg3 at lsmod is telling you two things: you have the driver, and it's tied to a logical net device. ifconfig run without arguments will show you any logical net device with a driver loaded. For example if you don't have ipw3945 or iwlwifi driver loaded, you won't see that wireless device at all if you ifconfig, but modprobe the driver and re-run ifconfig and suddenly you will see the net device.

your attempts to run dhclient show shows that the system is detecting a valid network device, but I am troubled by the 255.255.255.255 address. That seems wrong, but honestly dhclient is the one command of it's type that I am least familiar with. You should read the manpage for dhclient and see if there is a switch for asking for a normal address in case it's defaulting to try to load 255.255.255.255, I honestly don't know that aspect. While you are at it check on the argument for dhclient that sets the timeout to never, analogous to dhcpcd's "-t 0" switch.

Since ifconfig lists any net devices there are drivers loaded for, run it and if you see an eth0 try that one as well for the heck of it. In most distros, there is a file in /etc/ or /etc/udev/ that will show the bindings of what logical net device (eth0/eth1/wlan0/etc.) is bound to what hardware net device. For example, in my system it's a udev rules file called /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and it shows:

# Firewire device 474fc000196cb181)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="47:4f:c0:00:19:6c:b1:81", NAME="eth1"

# PCI device 0x8086:0x4222 (ipw3945)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:1b:77:88:ca:06", NAME="eth2"

You might notice that I have no entry for eth0, that's because in my kernel I compiled the tg3 driver INTO the kernel itself, so there is no module to modprobe--it's always loaded and never seen. I show you this not to confuse you but to show you that if we have the same hardware, my system udev is calling my firewire connection eth1. When I plug my network cable into my broadcom tigon3 port, I am using "ifup eth0" to run it.

I don't know for sure since I don't know udev all that well, but You might want to check that you are trying to start the correct device with dhclient. Try dhclient eth0.

Of course I think you know the other parts, making sure that the lan cable had connectivity lights as well as activity flickering light when the network is live and trying to communicate.

Can you clarify what you meant about the loading a new tg3? Did you mean in kernel config? If you have tg3 loaded at all, then the entry for broadcom tigon3 driver is enabled in the kernel.

The only way that would change would be if you installed a new kernel manually (not by apt, but going to kernel.org and getting the code and compiling it) and had to flip switches in the config one at a time.

I just tried ubuntu/kubuntu pre-release for gutsy gibbon on my Toshiba Tecra A9 that has essentially the same specs and it worked awesomely. I was even able to get COMPIZ-FUSION RUNNING!!!!! http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/gutsy/tribe-5/ Works great I highly recommend it.

It is quite easy, I did it with this script:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...o+gutsy+kernel

You just download the script and run it. Then edit manually your /boot/grub/menu.lst adding the new kernel and reboot and there you go.
Works like a charm. In fact im writing from my inspiron 1420 wired to the net!!!!

See ia.

If you need more info please contact me:

andrespinzon AT gmail DOT com

Fedora 7
insert DVD, install
finish.

Only needed to apply the IPW Firmware.

ubuntu works flawlessly on 1420, everything worked except for the wireless, installed it without any problems as well, but ubuntu is so much like vista, xp so i deleted it immediately after install, if you looking for a professional linux go for suse, or maybe fedora, but ubuntu, doesn't give you the feeling that you are using a linux