I ended up with a new Latitude D820 (2.00 GHz dual core Intel, 2 GB DDR, SATA drives, etc.) and I am having trouble getting some things working in linux. I was able to get ethernet, nVidia graphics, ACPI, and sound working.

I need to be able to access an external HDD that connects via FireWire. As far as I can tell the module loads correctly, but I don't know how to figure out which device the HDD will be recognized as in order to mount it.

I'm also unsure how to figure out which /dev a USB mem stick would be used as. I have done it before and the stick was called /dev/sda. Because of SATA, my main HDD is /dev/sda and I assume the flash stick will be /dev/sdb or/sdc, but how do I know? Any kind of utility to let you see the entire USB web?

lsmod also shows me the bluetooth module loaded, but I don't know how to use bluetooth under Linux as well. I would like to be able to transfer contacts and music to and from my mobile phone as I did under Windows.

Also, in /proc/cpuinfo it only shows one core of the processor. Does anyone know how to get both cores operating?

Any help would be appreciated. I am running Slackware 11 with kernel 2.6.17.13, which came on the install disk.

PS - How does a laptop register closing the lid? Suspend works manually but I would like it to suspend automatically when I shut the lid of the computer.

Matt

You need to recompile your kernel and config it to be SMP. As far as the other issues go, I'm not sure.

Thanks. I did finally get the kernel configured so that it didn't panic on startup and included multi processor support. I then got aggrivated at all the grief slack 11 was giving me. Now I'm running on a fresh install of Ubunto and everything save the WiFi is working flawlessly. It owuld have taken me days of config and messing around to get things to work this well with slack - things like the multimedia buttons and automatic mounting of eternal media like thumbdrives and firewire harddrives. Now my only issues are that the WiFi doesn't work (something I HOPE to be able to figure out) and there doesn't seem to be an mp3 codec, all I can play are my few .ogg files. Anyway, its all cool now, happy computin'