The Server Guy

Last Edited July 30, 2003

As I get other hardware working I will add sections to this page on how to get them functioning/tweaked highlighted in red.

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My System

• Hard Drive: 40GB

• Memory: 512MB 266MHz

• Network: Internal Broadcom 10/100 ethernet

• Video: ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility 32MB RAM

• Sound: on-chip Intel AC97 audio

• Wireless: Dell Truemobile 1150 802.11b mini-pci card (Added after purchase)

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Software Setup

• OS: Dual booting Gentoo Linux and Windows XP

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Installation

The first step was to wipe the hard drive clean, to get rid of all of the garbage installed by Dell. Then repartitioned the hard drive.

• 7GB NTFS partition for Windows

• 100MB ext3 partition for /boot

• 512MB swap partition

• 12GB ext3 partition for /

• approx 18GB remaining for data shared between Gentoo and Windows formatted fat32

After partitioning the drive the first step was to do a clean reinstall of Windows XP. Then spend a couple hours downloading and installing all of the updates.

The second step was to format the Gentoo partitions which provided an interesting observation. The CD-RW/DVD drive is actually /dev/hda and the hard drive is /dev/hdc. This isn’t a big deal, but must be noted for setup.

Gentoo Linux was installed from the version 1.4_rc4 CD (which can be downloaded from www.gentoo.org)

After booting from the Gentoo CD the internal Broadcom NIC worked immediately. At this point I started working through the stage 1 base install of Gentoo. Everything went very well. There were no snags to speak of.

The next step was to install xfree and KDE. The installs went very well and configuration of KDE was as simple as they get.

The next item I began working on was getting the internal modem to work. I discovered the modem is a Conexant winmodem and there are Linux drivers provided at www.linuxant.com. The modem in the 5100 uses the hsflinmodem drivers. Again configuration went very well.

The next item was getting ACPI to work with the battery monitor in KDE. This took quite a bit of digging, but I eventually got it working. You can see instructions below.

I am currently working on getting 3D acceleration funcioning in X and have had some limited success, but I believe it should be provide better benchmarks than is has at this point.

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Getting the Battery Monitor working with ACPI

*note, info in italics are commands to be typed at the console.

The following instructions assume your kernel has already been patched for ACPI.

First gunzip these two files… dsdt.patch.gz and dsdt.dat.gz

Next compile dsdt.dat using the Intel iasl compiler which can be downloaded from http://www.intel.com/technology/iapc/acpi/downloads.htm

./iasl -tc dsdt.dat

You should end up with a file called dsdt.hex

Now patch the kernel for your dsdt.

patch -p0 -i ./dsdt.patch

Copy dsdt.hex to:

/(linux source dir)/drivers/acpi/tables/acpi_dsdt.c

Then:

make config

Then compile ACPI into the kernel (do not make modules, odd problems have been reported with ACPI modules)

Finally copy your new kernel to /boot (don’t forget to update lilo if that’s your boot manager).

Reboot and enjoy your functioning battery monitor.

Another webpage with a good write-up on ACPI support on the 5100 is somewhere.fscked.org/laptop/

Also checkout acpi.sourceforge.net for additional info.

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Wireless Networking

After the purchase of the laptop I decided I needed wireless networking, so I purchased a Dell TrueMobile 1150 802.11b mini-pci card. I made this decision because the TrueMobile 1150 is well supported under Linux and the antenna was already installed in the laptop.

The only snag I ran into with the setup was the need to have PCMCIA drivers loaded for the card to work. The TrueMobile mini-pci card apparently uses/creates a PCMCIA to PCI bridge to function correctly. Other than that I just added support in the kernel for the Hermes wireless drivers.

So far the card has worked flawlessly.