Work with Dell Inspiron 8500

What follows in this page is what I've done to get my Dell Inspiron going (originally with Red Hat 9, but later with CentOS 4). A lot of it still doesn't work, unfortunately, but more does than when I started out. The first thing that you should consider doing is visiting some more developed sites. The ones I've been using are

Ethernet

First, I needed to gain access to the outside world, so I had to obtain a driver for the broadcom ethernet card. Drivers can be obtained from the Broadcom Website. Be sure to obtain the Linux driver under the "::BCM4401 Drivers::" header. You will get a linux-.zip file. Unzip this and you will obtain an rpm file and a tar.gz file. There is a README.txt file which tells you how to go from there. From Wilford's site, it's noted that you need to obtain kernel 2.4.20-9 (if using RH kernels) or higher, so you may need to update your kernel. The 2.4.20 kernel from kernel.org also works.

ACPI

This has been the absolute bane of my existence. As noted on the above websites, APM is not supported on the I8500. You must use ACPI. A really good page on how to get this going is off the The Linux Documentation Page by Emma Jane Hogbin. Simplified and explicit step-by-step instructions can be obtained from Bryan Moffit's site (look under "ACPI" on his page). To automate ACPI, you'll also want to get a hold of acpid. This will also make the battery monitor work, but it apparently also causes the machine to crash approximately every three hours. A compiled patched version is available from Mike Hardy. If you put it in /usr/libexec/battstat-applet-2 (remember to backup your old version), then it will check the battery state every 30 sec instead of 1 sec, but at least it will not crash your machine.

NTFS

For those of you who have dual boot to windows and want to see your windows files from linux. To do the following, you must be root. First, you need to make sure that you have the following line in your kernel .config file:

CONFIG_NTFS_FS=y

There is also a CONFIG_NTFS_RW option, but it's experimental and not all that safe. After compiling ntfs into the kernel, you should have a directory /mnt/winmnt (if you don't, make one). Use the command "fdisk -l" to find out where the NTFS system is. The output should look something like this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 4 32098+ de Dell Utility
/dev/hda2 * 5 1024 8193150 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3 1025 1789 6144862+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 1790 7296 44234977+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 1790 2051 2104483+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 2052 2313 2104483+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda7 2314 7296 40025916 83 Linux

Then use the command "mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/winmnt -t ntfs -r -o umask=0222" to make a read-only directory that will allow users to see the stuff from windows. Or better yet, add

/dev/hda2 /mnt/winmnt ntfs user,noauto,nosuid,umask=2 0 0

to your /etc/fstab file and have a simple "mount /mnt/winmnt" solve your troubles.

Wireless with Proxim

I bought the Proxim orinoco silver card, which unfortunately does not currently work out of box, because it uses the Hermes II chipset. However, fortunately, there is a way to get them to work! First, you must have the kernel sources on your computer. Next, obtain the pcmcia source codes from sourceforge. I grabbed pcmcia-cs-3.2.1, even though later versions are available, because that's the one that the driver listed in the instructions. The last thing you need is the driver, provided from proxim, and made available on Frederik Questier's site. Now, gunzip and untar the pcmcia file. Then "cd" into the pcmcia directory and gunzip and untar the Proxim driver in there. Then run the following: "make config", "make all", "make install" (if you've compiled pcmcia into the kernel already, it will only compile the necessary added modules). Restart pcmcia or reboot or whatever and now your Proxim orinoco should be working.

Multimedia Keys

If you're using RHEL/CentOS 4, you can set the keys by going to Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts. For older versions, use acme:

Ripped this pretty much from Diego's site (which is unfortunately defunct now), with some reminders for me. Needed to grab the acme daemon (either from rpmfind.net or from the redhat site). Newer versions exist, but I grabbed acme-2.0.4-0.ximian.6.2.i386.rpm. "rpm -i" this file, and then set the keys by going to the "Preferences->More Preferences->Multimedia Keys" menu item. Click on the various values and hit the appropriate key to set them. Also check the "Use PCM volume instead of Master volume" checkbox since the latter is independent of headphone volume. Also remember to check "Save current desktop" on logout so that all this stuff gets remembered.

ndiswrapper

If you have something that only has a windows driver, you may still be able to get it to run on linux (in my case, it was a linksys wireless card, because my proxim one was a bit flaky). Grab ndiswrapper from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper (you'll need at least kernel 2.4.26, or a 2.6.X kernel). Installation guidelines are here. For upgrade to CentOS, I needed to add an /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 file (it was automatically created with RH9, but oh well). This file is identical to the ifcfg-eth0 file, except DEVICE=wlan0, TYPE=Wireless, and lines had to be added for your MODE(=Managed) and ESSID(=linksys).

PCMCIA troubles

My PCMCIA freezes my computer during boot because of problems with pcmcia. The way I get around this nowadays is to remove the pcmcia startup at boot-time and start it manually by hand (a bit of a pain, but works for the time being). The way to do this is to first boot up linux in single user mode (if you're using grub, this means highlight the kernel version that you're booting to and type 'e' to edit the boot options. Then add the word "single" to the end of the options and hit enter. At the grub screen, type 'b' and that should do). To turn off pcmcia, type "chkconfig pcmcia off" at the prompt. On reboot, it should skip the pcmcia check and boot normally. Once you're started, "service pcmcia start" as root should start up your pcmcia.