Upd: upgraded units arrived July 11, since they sent us the wrong (1024) screen resolution version
Upd: 18GB became 20GB, XGA became SXGA+ (1400x1050)
- to work with the touchpad and external mouse at the same time, change the BIOS setting. If you have an imwheel based mouse you may not want to do this.
- sometimes the external mouse does not seem to be detected when you come back out suspend. You can try going to a VC and come back to X, or kill and restart gpm, or take out the mouse and re-insert it. I've had good luck with some of those.
- to safely switch playing DVD's from different reqions..... (the DVD in this unit is supposed to be multi-regionable)
- the hardware volume buttons on the left do not work in linux
- on occasion (probably once every other month) my machine does not wakeup from suspend normally, and i have to reboot. I'm still running BIOS rev. A06 though, Dell now has A08 available.
- Mandrake7.0 is fine, but 7.1 (or an upgrade to it) locks up when the maestro driver is loaded... Comment out the /etc/conf.modules entry for maestro and it appears to run fine (you will need a rescue boot for this or do this before rebooting the system). My upgraded mdk71 also seems to have problems with APM.
- Had problems with rh62 on the first unit, decided to install rh62 before memory was upgraded, and had no problems this time.
- Once I had multiple OS's (w98 and rh71) running again, the rh62 Meastro sound driver could not be loaded (the machine would hang) during a boot. Presumably the sound card was in a funny state. This was the default 2.2.14 kernel, it may very well be solved with later kernels, as the rh71 did not seem to suffer from this problem.
- autorepeat is too slow, i use kbdrate -r 30 to speed this up. After a suspend it will however loose this again. Need to patch the system resume scripts for that.
- I don't trust speed-step with current kernels yet, it may seem to work, but after a few days coming out of suspend mode will cause spurious lost interrupts, and a hanging system.
- I'm setting the clock to GMT and using ZONE to point at time-zone, which seems like a more sane way to handle time if you travel with the laptop. However, unlike my Micron, the Dell doesn't reset the time properly. I have to manually run "hwclock --hctosys" upon resume. Despite that CLOCK_SYNC="yes" in the system files.
- APM on the 5000e now also kinda-works (May 2001), but you need to upgrade with the new BIOS available on Dell's website.
- closing the lid, and Fn-ESC to suspend are not exactly the same. The former wakes up the machine by hitting a key, but it doesn't seem to wakeup my externally connected PS/2 mouse. It may have problems with other peripherals.
1. shrink Windoze partition 2. boot into Windoze and find the 'phdisk' program (possibly on one of the CDs that came with the machine) 3. run 'phdisk /create /partition' (check these switches!) 4. install Linux and remove Windoze. While installing Linux, fdisk shows: /dev/hda4 2566 2584 143640 a0 IBM Thinkpad hibernation This is the partition created by phdisk.
- booting from 2.4 to 2.2 will cause 2.2 to hang when it wants to load the maestro sounddriver. Simply go through a cold boot to make it forget it was in 2.4 mode. At fault is the slightly older 2.2 maestro driver (probably)
- "apm -s" did not want to wake up. Ooops, i don't do suspend, maybe should have done standby.... need to check this.
- vga=791 in lilo.conf did not work, console was blank.... but X worked. used vga=2, that worked fine, but does not look as nice in console.
Dell had a good offer for a new 32GB HD (also at 5400rpm as opposed to the default 4200rpm for laptop HDs), this included the housing, so although the Dell 5000 cannot be configured with 2 HDs, replacing the HD is now a matter of seconds (and a small screwdriver if you desire to keep the HD well attached). To my surprise Dell's windows install was linux friendly (i've seen much worse). In a nutshell these were the first steps
- installed rh62 on a non-first partition
- set the partition type of hda1 to 0c "(Win95 FAT32 (LBA)"
- ran "mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hda1" to format the partition for windows
- insert the purple special-for-Dell Win98 CD, choose the 3rd option to recover Win98 (4th option would reformat the disk, 1st and 2nd would only do drivers or win98 itself). This takes about 15 minutes.
- boot back to linux, and add dos to the lilo again, my /dos was now about 500MB, but it's only a 640x480 and 16 colors :-) [see also ms-sys]
- boot back to windows, now "Windows is running for first time" and you need to enter your language, keyboard, product ID (which I could not find, but later found out it's on a sticker at the bottom of the laptop), timezone etc.
- reboot again, and enter the system software CD from Dell. You need to manually start up the CD via the D: icon in "My Computer" and run "Setup" in the Audio, Video, Touchpad and Speedstep directories in Windows98. There are a few more things though (e.g. APR is the port replicator, which i don't have) you could do. Each time don't reboot the machine, we do that later.
- Now reboot the machine, (you should now see the 1400x1050 screen) and after that enter the DVD encoder software, the other CD Dell gave you with this machine.
- reboot again, and now you should be able to play DVD's !!!
- I then proceeded to install rh71, which was a total snap, realy easy. the 1400x1050 screen was detected, sound worked right away etc.etc. My /dos now contains 608MB.
- caveat: default rh62 needs to be booted from a cold start, else the Meastro-2E sound driver hangs the boot. Maybe newer kernels (>2.2.14) will have fixed this.
- now....anybody still claiming installing Windows98 is a snap, should probably be taken to an asilum.
The previously mentioned 32GB drive started making some really
scary noises. Happened twice, first christmas 2001, then
again in May 2002, both times locking the mahcine. First thinking
it was a disk crash, but it seems some kind of mechanical thing.
Ordered a new drive from Dell, and sadly , they didn't have the 32GB
available anymore. Instead replaced it with a 40GB. Despite that it
was running at 4200rpm, this drive was a lot lighter and also
faster: 19-20 MB/sec instead of 16-17 MB/sec, as measured with
hdparm. This time copied the contents over a 100Mbit link
to a fast desktop hard-drive. Installed RH73 on it, and copied
the data back. Time to copy: 2hr10min for 28 MB, or about
3.5 MB/sec. Command:
tar -cf - / | ssh xeon tar -C /a/BACKUP -xf -
if you use 2 batteries, one (expansion bay) will be used before the other, and between one and the other the charge will sit at 50% for 10-15 minutes or so. you can actually - carefyully - swap batteries if the laptop is on juice. I did suspend the machine while doing this.
(november 2003)
- graphic install doesn't work... so need to enter "linux text" at the prompt....
(november 2004)
- fedora core 3: graphic install works, but now X doesn't work. Adding
vga=792 seems to get get back to live. Some others mentioned
replacing "driver ati" by "driver vesa" in teh xorg.conf file,
but of course that way you loose acceleration
For inspiron 1000 is was mentioned that vga=733 did the trick.
- Nicolai Langfeldt
- Don Cohen
- anton.empl (CERN) Debian
- wbluhm, rh62
- David Turkington
- watsondk
- Simone Deparis
- Rob de Nie
- Linux Touchpad Driver
that should work on Dell laptops. Not tested on mine yet.
- 5000e: Jeff Lessem, the first 5000e results
- 5000e: John Spicer
- 5000e: Sarnag Lakare
- 5000e: Caldera
- 5000e:
Dell Inspiron 5000e Unofficial FAQ
- Apart from the comp.sys.laptop and comp.os.linux.portable newsgroups, Yahoo's Linux on Dell laptops discussion group has a lot of resources.