I recently got a Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop with the following :

SATA Hard Drive
Geforce 6800 Go
DDR 2 Memory
Broadcom 4000x Ethernet Control
Intel 2200 Wireless Network Adapter

The specs are pretty much the same as exodist's a few threads below but I have a slower processor and less RAM. I am running Gentoo Linux 2005.0.

I have gotten most thinsgs working but I am having a bunch of issues. This is my first time running Linux on a laptop.

1.ACPI does not work. If it is compiled into the kernel, the broadcom ethernet adapter does not work. Kernel ring buffer shows messages about an irq error and nobody caring. Right now, I can only get around this by disabling ACPI which means that I cannot use any power management features outside of what APM provides and I can't see battery status. I have tried various suggetions found from searching this message board and google including kernel boot parameters to have ACPI shuffle irqs and manually setting the ISA irq to no avail.

2.When I shut the lid, the only way to get the screen back after opening it is to use the alt keys. If I am in X Windows I must do something like press ctrl-alt-f1, then alt-f7 to get the screen back.

3.Is there a way to automatically disable the touchpad when an external USB mouse is plugged in?

I have the same laptop. I had several problems installing SuSE 9.2 Professional on it (broadcom ethernet never worked, and several times X didn't work either). I then tried installing Debian sarge on it, but it couldn't detect the hard drive. Finally I put Ubuntu on it and everything works fine. I know this isn't much help but:

1. Both ACPI and Ethernet work fine for me. What kernel version are you running? If it's old, you might want to try updating to a newer kernel because I heard there are some problems with this laptop on older kernels.


2. I haven't had this problem at all. Are you using XF86 or X.org?


3. I haven't tried this out yet, but I'd like to know the answer as well...