Fedora Core 2 Linux on my Dell Inspiron 300M


Contents

About my 300M

I received my 300M August 29, 2003. Windows XP came off August 30, 2003. I first put RedHat 9 on the machine (the details of this endevaour are documented as well). However, as RedHat was end-of-lifed, it becamse necessary to move onto a living, supported Linux. So, In September 2004, I installed Fedora Core 2 on my 300M. This is my story.

Here's the status of how my laptop is coming along. I will update as I proceed.

StatusComponent
okFedora Core 2 Install
okEthernet, BroadCom 5705M
okWireless, Intel Pro Wireless
okACPI Power Management
untestedSpecial Buttons (volume, sleep)
untestedSuspend
okCD-RW/DVD
okUSB
untestedFirewire
untestedPCMCIA
mostly fineDocking Bay

Fedora Core 2 Install

No difficulties during Fedora Core 2 install. The machine installed off the CDs no problem. Got a nice 2.6 kernel system.

I chose Intel 855 as video card, and "Dell 1024x768 Laptop Display Panel" as monitor. This appears to work fine.

Broadcom 5705M

Unlike as in RedHat9, the ethernet card was detected during install and configured perfectly.

Wireless

With RedHat9, I had resorted to (and recommended) using Ant Driverloader to make the Intel Pro Wirless 2100 work. Happily I can now recommend the free (in both senses) ipw2100 linux driver method. Not only is this a free software project, but it allows access to the wireless 'managed' mode, allowing use of tools such as kismet.

The setup is not difficult. I am grateful to Bill Moss for his explanations of the process, which I paraphrase below.

First, it is necessary to upgrade initscripts to the latest development version, because the version shipped with FC2 has "hotplug" disabled. The hotplug will be necessary to dynamically load the wireless card firmware image at boot. Get the initscripts and mkinitrd RPMs from http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/Fedora/RPMS/. Install them with rpm -Uvh mkinitrd-4.1.9-1.i386.rpm and rpm -Uvh initscripts-7.77-1.i386.rpm (except use the actual version number that you downloaded, of course).

Then download the ipw2100 package at http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/. Unpack the archive, and run make install.

Finally, make the directories /usr/lib/hotplug and /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware and copy the three ip2100 firmware files (*.fw) into the latter directory.

Reboot. Kudzu will discover the wireless card during boot, and you're all set! You can use system-config-network to set up some network connections, if you like.

ACPI

Coming soon

CD/DVD

Works fine! I can watch encrypted DVDs without trouble, unlike in RedHat9.

Buttons

These seems to be working fine. ACPI catches suspend (Function+Escape) presses and lid closes. The contrast buttons (Function+Up/Down) work fine. xev seems to catch keypresses for the others (like volume up/down), so I will have to do some xmodmap or xkb (whatever people use now) to make them do useful things.

Andrew Barr wrote me to say he figured out how to get the power button to generate ACPI events. He gave me permission to reproduce his email here.

I thought you might be interested to know that I have been able to coax ACPI events out of the 300m's power button. I read a very informative ACPI HOWTO on the Gentoo Linux forums (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=122145), and in Section 10c it described what to do if a power of sleep button was not working.

The poster goes into the hows and whys of these kinds of situations (evidently not uncommon at all), but the gist of how to fix it is this: you need this patch (http://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=1944&action=view), which is meant for a 2.6.1 kernel but applied to a vanilla 2.6.5 for me with no problem. Then, you build and boot from that kernel, adding the following to your kernel command line:

ignore_ff_buttons=PWRF

Then, you should see this:

ACPI: Power Button (CM) (PWRB)

instead of this:

ACPI: Power Button (FF) (PWRF)

in your kernel bootup messages. After that, you should get an event written to /proc/acpi/event every time the button is pressed, provided ACPI is working properly (e.g. patched DSDT in our case).

Thanks, Andrew.

Miscellaneous

I'm having trouble with the docking module thingie. If I plug the computer into the docking module while the computer is running, a little icon pops onto the screen and never goes away, and also the keyboard stops working. Haven't investigated further yet.

Floppy module de-installation: coming soon.

Yum configuration: coming soon.

XFCE: coming soon.

xplanet: coming soon.

Contact Me

If you have any questions about what I've done, or what to share some tips, please email me. Also you can visit my main website if you're bored.

Other resources and props

A Chinese Simplified translation and a Chinese Traditional translation was created by Zhou Zheng. His main website is here, and his English website is here. Xiexie, Zheng!

Sandra Loosemore is putting linux on her 300M, dartfrog. Good luck, Sandra. My machine is named Dr. Wifflechumps Junior, in case anyone wants to know.

Thanks again to Mike Hardy whose site was very helpful.

To create the 300M DSDT, I cribbed off the changes that Stefan Behnel made while fixing up his Samsung P10.

Richard Black's ACPI Howto was also very helpful.

Check out TuxMobil - Linux on laptops, notebooks, PDAs and mobile phones, for more pointers on running Linux on your laptop.

Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!

September 2004, Mike Hoolehan