Martin DiViaio on Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:10:13 +0100


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Re: [PLUG] Dell Inspiron 8100 Notebook


I have an Inspiron 8000 with Win2KPro and RH7.1. I don't know what the
differences are between the two machines but here is what I know about the
8000.

The modem is a winmodem with a standard Lucent chipset that is supported
at linmodem.com.

I don't know exactly what network card is in the machine but the eepro100
module recognizes the card and runs it fine.

The video card is an ATI Rage mobile that works with XFree86 version 4 but
I have been unable to get anything higher than 24bit color although it has
enough ram to do 1600x1200 at 32bit color. The S-Video out port is not
supported. There is a standard VGA port on the back of the machine but I
have not had a chance to try it yet so I can't say what sort of issues
exist there. Using the cards acceleration is SLOW. I can't get more than 1
frame every 3 to 5 seconds out of TuxRacer.

The touch pad and pointer are recognized as a single ps/2 device.

The sound card works fine with with the ALSA sound system but watch esd.
It can cause some really strange system freezes while in X.

PCMCIA chipset is supported through the standard pcmcia-cs.

USB chipset is supported.

I don't have any firewire devices so I can't say what issues exist there.

APM is fully supported but has a problem with the laptop's 'partial sleep'
mode. This a general issue for laptops and becomes aparent when you notice
the system clock getting out of sync with the hardware clock (about the
only real problem this causes). Playing around with the BIOS setting
eventually hits on the right combination that clears the problem up.

The plug-in bay devices are mostly hotswapable. I don't recommend trying
to do it too often though. The few times I've done it lead me to believe
that a kernel panic is not far off. Every plug-in device I have tried
so far has worked fine. Even the CD-RW drive. (It's IDE though so it takes
a little work to get it working.)

You did not mention what was in the permenent optical bay but my DVD drive
is fully supported.


On the 15th day of March in the year 2002 you wrote:

> Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 22:42:25 -0500
> From: Paul <paul@dpagin.net>
> To: plug@lists.phillylinux.org
> Subject: [PLUG] Dell Inspiron 8100 Notebook
>
> Does anyone have any hands-on experience with installing Linux on a Dell
> Inspiron 8100 notebook?  I want to dual boot Red Hat 7.2 and Windows XP, and
> I just want to be prepared for any problems that might come up.  (For $1350,
> it better work!)
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> Philadelphia Linux Users Group       -      http://www.phillylinux.org
> Announcements-http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
> General Discussion  -  http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug
>



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