GNU/Linux on a Dell Inspiron 2500

Installation of Mandrake 9.0 e customization for a fully functional GNU/Linux

Finished the installation of GNU/Linux Mandrake 9.0, almost everything of the laptop works. The audio card, video and XFree86, the cd-burner, the floppy drive, touchpad and keyboard, and network card. USB devices, such as the PDA Sharp Zaurus SL5500, the scanner AGFA Snapscan e20, work properly, right recognized by the Mandrake kernel; the same is for parallel-port devices (such as the printer Epson Stylus C70) and serial ones (Motorola Timeport T260). Thus, what, after the standard installation, does not work properly yet? And how to get everything working?

You have to upgrade the kernel to the 2.4.20 version or next ones, because the previous kernels of the 2.4.x series report errors about the memory allocation; otherwise you should have no troubles using old kernels of the 2.2.x series.

You need to install the proper drivers from the site heby.de/ltmodem, not included in the Linux kernel, because they contain opensource code but also binary-only parts. The tarball contains useful script for the installation, too.

The kernel included in the standard distribution of Mandrake 9.0 comes without ACPI drivers, the type of power management used by the BIOS of the laptop, but only APM drivers, that only let power off properly. To use the ACPI drivers, and get, for example, battery power check, management of the buttons power/suspend/lid, and a simple standby, you need a new Mandrake kernel from the either the Cooker or the 9.1 beta version. Otherwise you can create a custom kernel with the ACPI patch and another patch to get suspend-to-disk, swsusp, included in the Mandrake kernel, but with an old, not working version.

To set the launch of a program, with X, to the Dell keys placed near the power button, you need to configure them properly in the keymap of X (xmodmap.it for italian keyboards) in the directory /usr/share/xmodmap/. For example, adding the following lines:

    ! Play, Stop, Rew, Fwd
    keycode 129 = F22
    keycode 130 = F23
    keycode 131 = F24
    keycode 132 = F25
    ! Volume Up/Down
    keycode 174 = F26
    keycode 176 = F27

Then, using for example kmenuedit in KDE, you could set the key you wish to a program. I like to use them to control XMMS: to the keys 1 (rewind) and 2 (forward) I set the relate commands xmms –rew e xmms –fwd. For the keys play and stop, I launch a script I made for this, xmmsctrl, with the related options –play e –stop.

The Mandrake kernel includes the driver for the framebuffer of the video card i815, i810fb. However, to get the nice penguin logo at the boot, you need to compile the driver included in the kernel and not as module. Besides, the use of the i810fb framebuffer makes some problems with swsusp when resuming the session; thus I made a custom kernel with included the support to both vga16fb and i810fb, and using the first together with swsusp, and second in the different case.

To get a fully functional configuration, I applied various patches to the base kernel 2.4.20: the 20021212 version of ACPI, swsusp beta18, usbdnet (to connect the Linux PDA Sharp Zaurus), cpufreq (to modify the clock speed of the CPU), packet-cd (to write CD-RW with filesystem UDF), i810fb and supermount. All this is included in only one patch to apply to a vanilla kernel 2.4.20, and you can download it below, along with the configuration file I used.

• Patch for the kernel 2.4.20: patch-linux-2.4.20-flagar.bz2
• Configuration file: kernel-2.4.20-flagar-config.gz
• Script to control XMMS: xmmsctrl
• Output of dmesg
• Output of lspci -vv
• X configuration file: /etc/X11/xf86config-4
• Grub bootloader configuration file: /boot/grub/menu.lst
• /etc/modules.conf
• /etc/modules
• X keymap: /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.it
• Console keymap: /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/it-latin1.kmap.gz

• Old page to install Mandrake 8.1, sometimes useful to read
• Ansgar Hellwig's page
• Google search

• BIOS Phoenix
• HD 20Gb IDE
• RAM 1 dimm 128Mb PC100
• CPU Pentium® III Mobile 900Mhz
• CD-RW 8x integrated IDE/ATAPI
• Floppy 3,5 removable in the bay * LCD TFT 15 max res. 1024×768 32bit
• Video card Intel i815 4mb AGP with 3d accel.
• Audio card Sigmatel STAC9700/83/84 with microphone integrated and line-in
• Winmodem Lucent LT - RJ11 (combo miniPCI with the network card)
• Network card Intel EtherExpress Pro 100Mbps - RJ45 (combo miniPCI with the LT modem)
• USB 2 ports
• PCMCIA either 2 card type I - II or 1 card type III
• Parallel Port ECP IEEE1284
• Serial port standard RS232
• PS/2 port
• VGA port max res. 1600*1200 24bit
• Touchpad Synaptics 2 keys
• Keyboard: 4 special keys + 2 for volume regulation. Fn key, Windows® menu key.
• 3 leds for monitoring power/hd/battery.
• 2 fans
• 1 battery