latitude D500 - any problems?
 

hello

we have a dell latitude d500 on its way and it will be running linux, after we remove windows and get the rebate :) ( they would not give us linux as a preinstall 'servers only sir'

its getting the works, cd writer, bluetooth module, centreno ( new intell wireless chipset deely, i think my spelling of it is wrong ), half a gig and a bit of ram, and docking station thing.

my question is this:

has any one else got one of these, if they have, have there been any problems with linux running on it?

any commets on the kit would be appreciated too

thanks
antken

Centrino boards are acpi heavy, get the newest edition of your favorite distro. You might even want to try a Beta, RedHat's severn is apparently not an entire mess.

The Cd-writer is normal ATA, no worries, remember to emulate it to scsi. Bluetooth, depends on the chipset, probably covered, shouldn't be a problem.

The Intel 2100 wireless chipset isn't supported yet. It'll probably be a while too, might want to grab a cheap pcmcia card.

Also, when you do get up and running, you might want to think about building a page for www.linux-laptop.net

Cheers,

Finegan

hi,

thanks for the info, yes i certainly will build a page that laptop site as long as it helps others :)

just one question from your post:

you say to emulate the cdrw as a scsi, is this to make it faster or more compatable with toasing programs?

i have dealt with blue tooth before, to be honest it was not a problem just trying to bring up the ppp stuff was :)

as for wireless, i am not too fussed about that at the moment, may be i'll do abit of war driving in the future ;) ;) ( not really )

do you think we can start a campaine to get dell to offer linux as a desktop os? the guy on the phone ( very helpfull ( really ) ) said that they could only do it on servers ( ? )

Gahh... pppoe as a dsl connection? or are we talking dial-up? If its the former, there's an awesome little proggy that comes standard with more distros these days, the roaring penguin, brilliant little toy.

Uhmm... long ago in a pre-ide standard far far away, burners had all sorts of proprietary extensions that made it nearly an issue of writing a driver per device. Luckily, however, thanks to the newer Atapi standard around 1999, all of the newer drives adhere to a standard that allows you to just send scsi commands to the kernel, it does the fun translation, and so burning programs... or really, program, under UNIX (yeah, everyone, Solaris,HP_UX, you name it...), everyone just builds big graphical monsters that feed info to cdrecord and cdrdao... that's it. Most of the gummy distros, RedHat, SuSe, Mandrake... heck... even Slackware will try to set up scsi emulation for you. If you first open k3b or gcombust or xcdroast and it sees a drive, it worked.

Dell does rock, don't they? I wish I made enough money to buy something from them. Anyway, they launched a Linux option initiative a few years ago and then quickly swept it under the carpet... no reason why, too quickly to claim that it had failed... seems like Mike Dell might have had his chained yanked by MS, or Intel... or both. Its too political to try and grassroots it, but hey as long as you can get your windows tax returned, who cares.

Cheers,

Finegan

thanks for that info on cd burners, i did not know that.

yes dell are very good, so good in fact i think they have earned themselves a prasing email. i don't know if you've ever been to england but basically, in my opinion, service ( shops etc ) here suck, there are few helpful people, and dell are a very welcome change, efficient, fast, and polite.
now if every one was like the linux crowd with a splash of dell in them..... :)

in fact dell phoned me today, on a Saturday of all days, to ask me when i want my dell delivering !

when its been delivered, i will be sending them an email to say how helpful the sales guy was, and stuff. but i will also be telling them off for not providing an alternative to Microsoft as an operating system, linux for example, it is quite worrying that Microsoft can yank dells chain like that and get them to pull it back. quite frankly it shocks me that Microsoft can write into their contracts with people like dell, that they cannot sell computers with out operating systems. i don't want to start a flaming war but, Microsoft should not beable to dictate sales practice to hardware manufacturers like that, its just not right :(


BTW, the blue-tooth thing was just a straight forward ppp dial up, i got it working in the end, my only problem was that i did not have any hotpluging setup in for my blue-tooth module so i had to type a load of commands in to start the modules, bring up the rfcomm stuff then do the dial. i simple shell script did it in the end :)


thanks
antken

hello again,

my dell turned up yesterday, :D
i am currently in the process of writing my prasing email to dell and their exceptional service.

i have decided to keep the windows stuff on there, however i have compressed the windows partition image right down and left it dormant ( you never know i may need winblows for something, dont know what yet )

i am in the process of making preperations for linux to go on and all seems well so far.

just a quick question on the latest kernel ( is it 2.6 now? )
i am posting this message on the 6th august 2003, how far off is the latest stable build of the kernel?

i am asking this because i would like to install the latest kernel when its released.


thanks
antken

2.6 is theoretically stable, it takes a newer version of modutils to load modules though, and it runs native posix threads which your glibc doesn't have so... it might not be something you really want to try. 2.4.22 will be out shortly, all of the -preX's have worked well for me too.

Cheers,

Finegan

gcc issues eh?

thats probably why the module builds are messing up about half way through

i noticed that the kernel team has changed the look of xconfig and the build process, please could you comfirm i am running them in the right order

make mrproper
make xconfig
make modules
make bzImage
make modules_install

is this right? i notice there is no make dep now
any who i am having some trouble with my graphics adapter, and i cannot get it out of 640x480 even though the config is set up as 1024x768 any ideas? the card has been picked up as a vesa ( it helps )

nah, there are pletty of kernel components that still won't build... initio scsi card modules will break the build for instance.

Also, as far as I remember... they've changed things so that the following should get you a bzimage and modules:

make mrpropper
make menuconfig (my favorite :P )
make
make modules_install

I bet your broken build is actually coming from a chunk of non-compilable code in there, just take note of where it errors and remove that support.

Cheers,

Finegan

Look at www.tuxmobile.de/dell.html
It is all german, but there is a Linux 8.1 description. Little hint: I used SuSE 8.1 because SuSE 8.2 with its XFree 4.3 and GCC 3.3 is not supported yet by the binary i855 driver from Intel. And the Intel sources did not compile due to missing header files.
Have fun.