My expereinces with Linux on a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop

• I 8200 model
  
• Pentium 4    2.2 Ghz
• 512 MB RAM
• 40GB HDD
• 15'' display with 32 MB dispaly memory. resolution is 1600*1200 at 16 bit color.  Windows claims that is supports 32 bit color, not tried it so far.
• Internal wireless card.
  
• CDRW/DVD combo
• Floppy drive
• Modem ( Windows identified this as "actiontec md56ord v92 mdc" modem)

I successfully installed Redhat 8.0 on the machine. The kernel version is 2.4.18-14. [I later upgraded to Fedora 2, kernel 2.6.5-1.358. See below for  fedora 2 experiences.]  Here are my experiences with the install :

• Sound worked out of the box! Well, after somedays, sound stopped working. No idea why. Running "sndconfig" did the job. The card is recognised as model Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio.   Update. Actually, sound is pretty flaky.   For some reason, sound stops working once ina while. mpg123 complains that it was not able to open /dev/dsp. Sometimes, running sndconfig does not fix the problem.  I deleted all the sound entries from /etc/modules.conf , rebooted and ran sndconfig. Now sound works. At a later point, I figured that this was because X starts artsd, which monopolised the sound device.       If the sound becomes squeaky, I do "rmmod i810_audio", and everything is fine from then. This module gets reinserted when on demand.

• Display worked out of the box. I choose nvidia geforce 4 for the gfx card and 1600X laptop panel for  display. I currently am using the machine at a resolution of 1600*1200 pixels at 16 colour depth.  I am using the VESA driver. Though nvidia has the Linux drivers for this card at their website, I am too lazy to get the drivers from their sites.

• (Inbuilt) Ethernet worked out of the box. Windows says that the machine has "3com 3c920 integrated fast ethernet controller  (3c905c-tx compatible)". It is located on PCI bus 2, device 0, function 0.    

• (Inbuilt) Wireless works. This has the Broadcom 1180 chipset. Could not get a driver for it. Apparently, they used 1150 chipset for earlier machines, for which the driver exists.  If you know how to get the 1180 to work, please let me know!   Update : (26 Dec 2002)  Dell agreed to replace the 1180 chip with the 1150 chip. Thankfully, both had almost the same form factor. Windows thinks the 1150 chip is a "dell truemobile 1150 series wireless lan mini pci card" on Texas Instruments PCI-1410 cardbus cont.   On the windows side, the driver is provided by Lucent/Agere. I installed the chip, and Linux (RHL 8.0) immediately recognised the card!  It uses the orinoco_cs driver.Apparently, for some ppl, (may be the ppl who had the chip in the machine when they installed Linux) the machine was trying to use the wvlan_cs driver, which gives some problems.  For the 1150 chip, the manufacturer part # is 11VMD and dell # is 430-3572.  However, by default it runs at 2Mb/s.   I need to figure out how to make it run faster.
  

• Modem works: As I said earlier, windows identified this modem as "actiontec md56ord v92 mdc" modem. Apparently this modem has a Conexant chipset. Apparently, this falls in "HSF" family of modems. (whatever that may mean!)  So I got the HSF (softmodem) driver. And it works!   I got the drivers from this page. I actually had slight problems in getting this to work. Firstly, I tried using the "generic" tar..gz package from the website. However, the install fails, though the install script does not understand that. The script results in depmod failing, but the script does not understand that. This may be actually a problem with my kernel source directory, which does not compile modules for some wierd reason. Anyway, I instead installed the rpm file and it works.  Apparently, it is important to get the correct rpm. My kernel version is 2.4.18-14 and you can find a copy of the rpm for this kernel (the one I used) here.  You can  find a copy of the "generic" drivers here : tar.gz , rpm , srpm .  CAUTION: The drivers on my page are beta drivers. They worked for me. You may want to check with the real page for the actual drivers.
  

• Power management : Suspsend to RAM works 80% of times in X. X is always restored properly on resume. s2ram works more often outside X.  In the failures, wireless (eth1) and ethernet (eth0) fail to restore properly. One of the devices disappears, and the other device is unuasble.  There has been considerable discussion about this on the linux-dell-laptops list. dmesg after resume gives :
• • usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 20, frame# 0
    usb-uhci.c: Host controller halted, trying to restart.
    usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 20, frame# 0
    usb-uhci.c: Host controller halted, trying to restart.
    resume warning: bios doesn't restore PCI state properly
    resume warning: if resume failed, try booting with resume=force
    RegisterClient: Out of resource
    ds: unable to create instance of 'orinoco_cs'!
    divert: allocating divert_blk for eth0
    eth0: Station identity 001f:0001:0006:0010
    eth0: Looks like a Lucent/Agere firmware version 6.16
    eth0: Ad-hoc demo mode supported
    eth0: IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported
    eth0: WEP supported, 104-bit key
    eth0: MAC address 00:02:2D:5D:29:87
    eth0: Station name "HERMES I"
    eth0: ready
    eth0: index 0x01: Vcc 3.3, irq 11, io 0x0100-0x013f
    
    

                    [This paragraph was written before the apmcontinue hack. This pare is no longer useful. Keeping it here for the sake of history.]I tweaked apmd a bit. (I dont remember if it was required to tweak the file.) I added to network to RESTORESERVICES. I think this it was required to get the network to work after resume.  Looks like BIOS(version A06) is ok as far as handling cardctl suspend/resume.  Changing PCMCIABIOSBUG="yes" to PCMCIABIOSBUG="no" did not have any impact on suspend/resume. If you know what causes the eth0/eth1 to have problems, please let me know! Sometimes, the error msg "usb-uhci.c: Host controller halted, trying to restart." is printed zillions of times.  However, this has nothing todo with network getting screwed after resume.  I diasbled USB by passing "nousb" option to kernel and that does not make any difference to resume failures.  Even with/without nousb option to kernel, second or subsequent invocations of s2ram takes a while to suspend.  I did not try suspend to disk.

• • From the linux-dell-laptops list : [Got a lot of help from Dave Kristol] I was able to get (more) reliable suspend/resume by creating an /etc/sysconfig/apmscripts/apmcontinue script. I tweaked apmd a bit, not much use though. Look at the apmd to see what I tweaked.
    
  
  
  • (Without apmcontinue script) Suppose eth0 dies. Then do, 
    • /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia stop (now 3c59x module is not loaded)
    • ifup eth0
    • /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia stop
    • This shud restore the system to a sane state, where network works.

• USB works: Worked out of the box. I connected 2 USB floppy drives at the same time. When you plugin the USB drives, they are available through /dev/sda and /dev/sda1.
• CPU fans :  The fans are on most of the times, and make a lot of sound. Sometimes, I used this program to control the fans. For this program to work, u shud load the i8k module. There were problems in getting this program to compile. This is mostly due to KDE 3.0 and 3.1 incompatibilities. To get it to work on REdhat 8.0 system, the author supplied me with kfani8kui.ui and optionsui.ui.  This patch worked. Also for some wierd reason, the fans soemtimes go full blast after a resume from suspend. This is a bug in the BIOS, BIOS sometimes confused about the temperature. Fn+z causes the BIOS to recheck the temperature. This quitens the fans. 
• BIOS : I use the A06 version of the BIOS.
• Time : There is some problem due apm.   

while true ;
do

cat /proc/apm > /dev/null

done

makes the sytem clock run at about half-speend and you lost time. Check David Carlton's  page for more info.

Misc stuff:

• "lspci -vv" output
• XF86Config
• modules.conf
• apmd
• lsmod

• General site about the hardware etc.
• Technical support :  On 13 May 2003, (an hour before my Oakland conference talk!) the laptop display failed.  The screen became ugly all of a sudden.  I used another monitor to make sure that the problem is with the LCD display and not the video card. Then I called Dell technical support on 20 May 2003 and after about 15 minutes of talking, they agreed to change the LCD. Apparently, Dell prides itself in its sloppiness. I have the next day onsite warranty plan. But, Dell fixed this problem for me only on 17 June 2003. And they did this only after about 8 phone calls from me!  In two of the calls, they support person realised that I was very unhappy with them.  They had given me $100 and $250 credit on these ocassions.  The guy who came to my place to fix it was from Unisys.  They apparently do this for Dell, HP, NEC and Gateway.  He told me that this delay on the part of Dell is unusual.  Also, he says that Dell is supposed to have good support.  He might be right, but my experience speaks otherwise.  Anyway, now that I have got a new LCD panel on my machine, the machine rocks again.  Earlier, I was unhappy that the keys made some impressions on the LCD screen. Now, I can use the leather sheet I bought from www.koverz.com to protect my new screen and make it always look "new".
  

Microsoft Windows : I have XP on the machine. First time I actually liked a windows machine! You might want to read of my horror stories wint windows on my IBM thinkpad.

• One day, I tried installing an external modem, and windows networking failed completely after that. After calling the tech support, I learnt that it is because of TCP/IP stack problems. The magic command dell told me is "netsh int ip reset dellip.txt".

Other Linux Dell 8200 laptop pages:

• Gentoo linux 1.4rc4 on a Dell Inspiron 8200.
• Unknown distribution.
• Subartik's page.

Other Linux Dell laptop pages:

• Ted's Dell Inspiron 600m page. He seems to have gotten everything to work.

Fedora 2 experiences:

Good luck!

Sudhakar.

In case you are interested, the order details from Dell are as

Qty  Part #    Abbreviated Description
--- -------- ---------------------------------------------
0001 221-1431 I8200,15 IN UXGA,P4,2.2GHZ
0001 311-1357 512MB,DDR,266MHZ (2 DIMM)
0001 320-0194 32MB DDR 4X AGP NVIDIA NV17 3D VIDEO
0001 340-3968 40GB HARD DRIVE,5400RPM,I8100/8200
0001 340-6353 FLOPPY DRIVE, INSP, TIED
0001 430-0334 INTEGRATED NETWORK CARD I8200
0001 313-0832 INTERNAL 56K MODEM
0001 313-1192 FIXED 24X INT CD-RW/DVD COMB DR,I8200
0001 430-0398 802.11,1180 MINIPCI WIRELESS 1180I INSP
0001 312-0039 LITHIUM ION SPARE BATTERY