Re: [PLUG] Dell Inspiron 8100 Notebook

[Paul <paul@dpagin.net>]

Side bar on shopping: If I bought this thing through MyPoints I could have earned
a $25.00 gift certificate.  The wife also showed my another site that could have
gotten us 2% off as an alternative.  It took her about two minutes to find those
deals.  So I wasted as much as $27.00 just to surprise her.


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

That's always good to know since retail modem cards could cost an additional
$100.  Not good when you have a modem built in!


> 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 8100 has GeForce2 16MB video.  My brother in law has a GeForce2 card in a PC
and Red Hat 7.2 didn't have a problem with it, but we didn't try anything graphics
intensive.  (The other available cards are a 32MB GeForce2 and a 64MB Radeon.)


> 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.

What do you mean by "esd"?  Electro static discharge?


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

I went with a 24x CD-ROM drive instead of a DVD or writer.

As far as Linux goes, my first thought is to use Partition Magic to carve out some
space and just do the install.

Here are some specs on the 8100:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/model_inspn_3_inspn_8000.htm#tabtop


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