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1. Component Status
2. Hardware Specs
3. Installation
4. Video
5. Sound
6. Wireless
7. CPU Scaling
8. Ethernet
9. DVD RW
10. Suspend/sleep
11. IRDA
12. Modem

• Intel Pentium M Processor 765(2.1GHz,400MHz)
• 14.1-in 1024x768 XGA display w/ 32MB ATI Radeon FireGL 9000 Video Card
• 1GB,DDR,266MHZ 1 DIMMS
• 80GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive
• Internal 56K Modem
• Internal Broadcom Ethernet Card
• 8x CD/DVD Burner (DVD+RW,+/-R)
• Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 Internal Wireless Card (802.11b/g,54Mbps)

I occasionally use Windows for work or games, so I wanted to keep the NTFS partition around. As far as I know, GNU parted can't resize NTFS partitions, but there might be some other utility out there that does. If you have the Windows CD, you can take the long route and reformat your drive, create a smaller NTFS partition, and reinstall Windows. I took the easy route, and bought a copy of Partition Magic. I used the Partition Magic GUI to specify a size of 20 GB for the NTFS partition, left everything for Linux, then rebooted and waited for Partition Magic to resize partition.

Note: Dell did not ship Windows CDs with the 600m. Apparently there is supposed to be some Dell utility that allows you to create an Windows CD from the OS installed on the laptop, but that utility wasn't installed on the laptop either. I am still wrestling with Dell support to get the Windows CD.

The Inspiron wasn't set to boot from a CD, so I put the FC4 disc 1 in the CD drive, rebooted, and hit F2 during startup to enter BIOS setup. I changed the device boot order in the BIOS settings and booted from the CD. Then I set up partitions using Disk Druid, and told it to put the root partition on hda5.

The Fedora installation was pretty straightforward, except I didn't set enough space aside for the /usr partition. If you're going to install a large percentage of the distro packages, you should set aside at least 3.5 GB if not 4 GB for the /usr package. I only set 2 GB aside (remember when 2GB was too much memory?), and had to redo most of the installation process. Doh! Anyway, the installation eventually finished, and I moved on to configuring my system.

One of the first things I did after RedHat was installed was disable SE Linux. In my experience, you'll have a hard time configuring your new system unless you disable it. You may want to turn it on after you're done tweaking your system, but here's how to turn it off:

1. Edit /etc/selinux/config
2. Set SELINUX=Disabled
3. reboot

Also, if you aren't using yum to do RPM downloads and installs yet, you're missing out. yum removes 90% of the frustration of downloading and trying to install an RPM, only to discover that the RPM depends on another RPM. Here's my /etc/yum.conf:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
retries=20
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1

# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in /etc/yum.repos.d

[core]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - core
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearch/core
gpgcheck=0

[updates]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - updates
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearch/updates
gpgcheck=0

[freshrpms]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - freshrpms
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearch/freshrpms
gpgcheck=0

1. Get the firmware from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php
2. Download the 2.2 version of the firmware
3. Unzip the package, and copy all *.fw files into /lib/firmware
4. Reload the wireless module with "rmmod ipw2200" and "modprobe ipw2200"

1. Go to Applications-->System Tools-->Internet Configuration Wizard
2. Select wireless connection
3. Select wireless card Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG
4. Put in your wireless settings (don't forget 0x in front of your WEP key if it is a hex key)
5. Click the green check to activate the card.

1. Go to Desktop-->System Settings-->Display-->Hardware
2. Select the Generic LCD Display, 1024x786 LCD. I tried using the Dell 1024x786 settings, but had problems with it, so I'm sticking with the generic LCD
3. Go to Desktop-->Preferences-->Screen Resolution, and set the resolution to 1024x786

I also tried loading the proprietary ATI video drivers in the hopes I could get a faster framerate. The framerate was actually slower with the proprietary drivers! I'd recommend sticking with the DRI drivers.

1. Go to Applications-->Sound & Video-->Volume Control-->Edit--Preferences.
2. Scroll to the bottom, and click the checkbox for External Amplifier
3. Click on the Switches tab, and click the External Amplifier checkbox.

Recording to DVDs was no problem. Put a blank DVD in, and the Gnome CD/DVD Creator window will pop up. Drag files to the window, and then go to File -->Write to Disc, and the files will be burnt to disc.

First, download a tool called video_post from an attachment in the bug report at http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3670. Firefox will call the file attachment.cgi, but it is actually a compressed tarball, so rename it to something like "video_post.tgz"

Create a directory for the video_post tool. I made one called /etc/acpi/utils. Then, extract video_post.tgz in /etc/acpi/utils. This will create a directory called "emu" with the source and an executable for the video post tool.

Next, create a file called /etc/acpi/events/sleep.conf with the following lines:

event=button/sleep *
action=/etc/acpi/actions/sleep.sh

Now create a file called /etc/acpi/actions/sleep.sh with these lines:

#!/bin/tcsh
# Script to drive the system to S3
# suspend-to-ram
#
# JRA Jan 2005

# Step 1: preparing sleep

if (-e /suspending) then
 wall 'The system is currently in the process of suspending, or stale lockfile "/suspending" exists. If the system does not suspend in a few seconds, remove lock file, and try to suspend again'
else
/bin/touch /suspending
/usr/bin/killall -s SIGUSR1 cpuspeed
/usr/bin/chvt 1 # necessary to make DRI work
/sbin/service anacron stop
# USB doesn't suspend without unloading first
/sbin/rmmod ehci_hcd
/sbin/rmmod uhci_hcd
#unload Linuxant modem drivers
/usr/sbin/hsfstop #if you use the linuxant modem driver
#save the system time
/sbin/hwclock --adjust
/sbin/rmmod wacom # only necessary of you have wacom stylus
/sbin/rmmod -as
/bin/sync
# Step 2: send sleep command via ACPI
echo mem > /sys/power/state

# Step 3: wake-up and reload
/etc/acpi/utils/emu/video_post
/sbin/hwclock --hctosys
#reload Linuxant modem drivers
/sbin/modprobe /dev/modem #if you use the linuxant modem driver
/sbin/modprobe ehci_hcd
/sbin/modprobe uhci_hcd
# initialise X
xinit /bin/false -- :1
/usr/bin/chvt 7
/sbin/service anacron start
/sbin/service cpuspeed restart
rm /suspending
endif

Also, note that this script creates a lock file called "/suspending" when it starts to suspend the laptop. If you fail to successfully recover from suspend mode, you'll have to remove this lock file by hand. Otherwise, the next time you try to suspend, the script will exit without doing anything.

Then restart the acpi service with "/etc/init.d/acpid restart". Now you just hit Fn+Esc to suspend the 600m. My 600m hangs on resume about every 10th time, and for some reason the maximum scaling frequency is stuck on 600Mhz if resume doesn't work properly. See CPU Scaling for info on how to change the max scaling frequency.

I was getting a "No speed steps could be determined" error every time I tried to run /etc/init.d/cpuspeed. After trying many things, I noticed that both scaling_max_freq and scaling_min_freq in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq were set to 600000 (600 MHz).

I did: echo 2100000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq and then /etc/init.d/cpuspeed restart

After that the CPU would throttle up to meet demand, and I could also change the speed manually with the Gnome CPU frequency applet.
If you're trying to set various cpuspeed options, I recommend running the commands in /etc/init.d/cpuspeed manually, instead of using the cpuspeed script, which hides many possible error messages when the script has problems. Once you have the options you need, you can go back to using the cpuspeed script.

• Turn Infrared on in the BIOS. I set my IR port to COM2 (ttyS1).
• Update /etc/sysconfig/irda. Mine looks like this:

        IRDA=yes
        DEVICE=/dev/ttyS1
        #DONGLE=actisys+
        DISCOVERY=yes
        

• Start up the irda service: service irda start (or /etc/init.d/irda start)
• Run irdadump. Point your Palm at the IR port on the left side of the laptop. Start the HotSync app on the Palm, select option "IR to a PC/Handheld", and and press the HotSync icon. If things are working, you should see the following show up in the irdadump output:

   05:46:04.362098 xid:cmd ffffffff < 3ce921b7 S=6 s=* IrCOMM hint=8204 [ PDA/Palmtop IrCOMM ] (23)

• You should now be able to use pilot-xfer on the laptop to talk to your Palm on ircomm0 with a command like: pilot-xfer -p /dev/ircomm0 -l

...
#start section of /etc/init.d/irda 
start() {
   # Attach irda device
   echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
   /sbin/modprobe ircomm-tty 2>/dev/null
   /sbin/modprobe irtty-sir 2>/dev/null
   /sbin/modprobe irnet 2>/dev/null
   daemon /usr/sbin/irattach ${DEVICE} ${ARGS}
   touch /var/lock/subsys/irda
   #make the ircomm0 port usable by everyone
   chmod a+rw /dev/ircomm0
   echo
}
...

00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [Generic])
        Subsystem: Conexant: Unknown device 5422
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 5
        I/O ports at b400 [size=256]
        I/O ports at b080 [size=128]
        Capabilities: <available only to root>

Providing detail for device at  00:1f.6
  with vendor-ID:device-ID
            ----:----
Class 0703: 8086:24c6   Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [Generic])
  SubSystem 14f1:5422  Conexant: Unknown device 5422
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 5

                  -----PCI_IDs-------                    --CompilerVer-
    Feature List:  Primary  Subsystem Distr  KernelVer   kernel default  CPU
 ./scanModem test 8086:24c6 14f1:5422 redhat 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4  4.0.0 4.0.0    i686
              From records, 14f1:5422 has soft modem codec CXT
 The Subsystem PCI id identifies a ConeXanT CXTnm codec.
 Support is ONLY available the hsfmodem software from http://www.linuxant.com/drivers

Note that the vendor/device id for the modem is 8086:24c6, and support is available with the hsfmodem drivers. The HSF driver README on Linuxant's web site indicates that the 8086:24c6 is supported.

I downloaded hsfmodem-7.18.00.07full_k2.6.14_1.1644_FC4-1fdr.i686.rpm.zip, unzipped it, and installed it with rpm. You may want to check the Linuxant site instead of using this link to see if there is a newer version of their driver.

The free version of the Linuxant driver is limited to 14.4Kbps. If you need more speed, you'll have to drop some cash for a license.

Larry Reeder, Sun Oct 23 22:53:03 MDT 2005, lnreeder AT gmail DOT com.