The Dell Inspiron 4000 is a quite nice notebook, the one I installed linux on had the following features:
Unfortunately a lot of the hardware is quite new and I spent quite some amount of time getting most things running, so I want to share this. I got a lot of useful information from users describing their experience installing linux on other Dell notebooks (unfortunately no Inspiron 4000) on THE linux on laptops page, so if you find some information from you in this document, thanks again.
The notebook came with 2 partitions, a 128 MB suspend to disk partition and
a 9.something GB partition with Win 98 on it, so I split the second one
with Fips2.0.
I installed SuSE 7.0 from DVD. Booting from DVD works fine after you activate
it as boot device in the BIOS (hit F2 on the Dell screen to get there), and
the first part of the installation went smoothly. Unfortunately SaX (the SuSE
tool for configuring X) didn't show a stable picture, and I panicked, so
I was on my own installing XFree86.
The standard Xserver in SuSE7.0 is still 3.3.6, but from the XFree86.org
web pages it was clear that I needed 4.0 to get it running. I found some
references of people claiming to use 4.0.1 successfully, but I can't confirm
this. I tried to get it running for a couple of days, but never got a picture
(well actually I got some pretty frightening color patterns on the TFT and no
picture at all with an external monitor).
Finally I upgraded to 4.0.2, and it worked right away. Here is the
XF86Config I use and the server output.
The next step was configuring the sound. I already knew that I had to get
an experimental driver from http://www.zabbo.net/maestro3, but at least playback
with this driver seems to be stable, the mixer works etc.
The rest was almost plug and play ;) For unknown reasons I failed to get
the parallel port running (I wanted to connect a Epson Stylus Color 680 to it),
but USB worked almost instantly, so I didn't care too much. I just had to add
the USB printer driver in /etc/rc.config.d/usb.rc.config.
(by the way, if you're looking for a driver for this printer, go to
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net and get print-4.1.1.tar.gz. You have to compile
your own version of ghostscript, but then you have a really nice new driver
called stp in gs with is able to make full use of the printers capabilities).
Apm worked out of the box too, including suspend to disk. The status monitor
claims that the fully charged battery will last for more than 5 hours, but if
you actually use the notebook,
I think this will be less, but probably still 3-4 hours.
The Winmodem is unfortunately totally useless in linux, so I got a PCMCIA
modem, which works fine without any configuration work too.
Update (02.03.01): I got a mail pointing me to
another Inspiron 4000 page
reporting success using the Lucent winmodem that comes as part of the internal
modem/ethernet combo. I'm pretty sure that the winmodem used in the
configuration I saw was a 3com one which is not supported, but since I don't
have access to the notebook any more I can't verify this. Dell seems to use
winmodems from different vendors in different hardware configurations. So the
bottom line seems to be: If you got your notebook with a winmodem, check
what exact flavor it is. Then you can find out if it's supported at on
this web page.
Over all, a really nice notebook, unfortunately slightly too new at the time
of purchase (yes, I checked before ordering, but it wasn't obvious to me that
there are a lot of different versions of the ATI Rage 128 graphics chip).
Now everything seems to be fine, I wonder if there is a way to hotswap the
DVD and the floppy like you can do with Windows, but this is not really
important.
Unfortunately it's not my own notebook, so I might not be able to answer
more questions related to it, but I hope this information proves useful for
other Inspiron 4000 owners.
DISCLAIMER: This information is provided without any warranty. If you break something, blame yourself, not me.
| Created 07.01.01 by Holger Denz |