Linux Fedora Core 3/4 on a Dell Latitude X300

FC1/3

Stuart and Sylvain got these machines in 2004/5. I don't recall any problems with Stuart's machine, but Sylvain's threw me off, hence the following notes, related to the fact that the USB-based CD allows to be bootable, but with lots of other little problems:
  1. the partitionmagic CD didn't want to boot (due to the USB nature of the CD). Solution: boot in XP, and install it as an application and let the machine reboot itself and repartition the disk following the usual partitionmagic procedure.
  2. some older versions of FC didn't bootstrap itself properly, i.e. did not load the USB drivers that made the install continue along. FC3 was working fince, but FC1 should be ok too.
  3. the broadcom Gigabit ethernet card (BCM5705M) was not recognized, the tg3 driver does not seem to work (V3.10 14-sep-2004). 
       things tried:
	booting with acpi=off
	commenting out 'alias eth0 tg3' but yet it got insmod'd, wondering why
	updating the whole FC3, not just the kernel

  eventually solved this by downloading the bcm... driver from the 
  broadcom website.
	http://www.broadcom.com/drivers/
  is what I used, but their versions change
  (I used version 7.3.5 - 07/29/04)
  4. the ipw2200 wireless is not included in the 667 kernel, downloaded latest version of code and firmware and installed, after which ok. Don't use the builtin 766 version, since it's an older driver that needs older firmware.
  5. upgrading the kernel to 2.6..10-766 caused the CD/USB drive to become unreadable. So, back to the original 667. bizarre.
  6. out of the box acpi isn't working

FC4

Notes on dec 22, 2005, upgrading Stuart's FC1 to FC4. We use a DVD install. This page was last modified on 22-Dec-2005 by teuben@astro.umd.edu.