This machine came with Windows XP Professional (with SP1a). I have since installed Fedora Core 2 as well.
Since the original installation, the machine has been upgrated to:
I had decided to partition the 80GB drive as:
Dell Utility |
47Mb |
Windows |
20GB |
/ |
15GB |
/boot |
100 Mb |
/home |
20GB |
/usr |
15GB |
swap |
2GB |
I used qtParted (on a Knoppix 3.4 CD) to resize the original 80GB Windows partition back to 20GB. The only hiccup with this was that the Windows partition was already fragmented. In addition the Master File Table (MFT) was positioned above the this point in the disk as well. I used a trial version of perfect disk from Raxco (www.raxco.com) to defrag and optimise the disk. NB The defrag utility in Windows XP does not optimise the disk at all.
To move the MFT, I first defraged / optimised the disk (which caused the MFT to be moved to the middle of the disk), Then I resized the disk with qtParted to the end of the MFT. The defrag / optimise was repeated to move the MFT to the middle of the smaller partition. The disk could then be resized back down to the desired size.
The Fedora Core 2 installation went smoothly. All hardware appeared to be detected. The hi-resolution screen was included in the X setup options.
However, the firewire and modem haven't been tried to date. The fireware appears in the hardware browser and has been assigned the ohci1394 driver, so I assume it will work.
As the modem is a winmodem, I assume I will do a bit of fiddling to get it to work.
The touchpad worked as a basic pointing device "out of the box". To utilise the more advanced features, such as "Tapping" and "Scrolling" I installed the qsynaptics driver (from http://qsynaptics.sourceforge.net/. When I checked, I found that the FC2 kernel did have the required components included, so a patch or recompile wasn't necissary.
Since the original installation, I have changed this machine over to SuSe. I originally installed 9.2, and now run 10.2. Basicly, under SuSE, everything "Just Worked" (TM).
The modem is a a Smartlink modem. The driver can be found at: http://www.smlink.com if your distribution doesn't include it already. The main thing to note is this modem uses alsa to function. To initialise it, run:
slmodemd --alsa hw:0
At this time, I haven't actually used the modem, but I can query it in kppp.
Under SuSE (both 9.2 and 9.3) it is detected automaticly and the drivers and /etc/init.d/ control script are installed. Unfortunately, the startup script supplied has a slight error. It didn't correctly pass the parameters set in /etc/sysconfig/slmodemd . Here are my (working) versions of:
These scripts are for SuSE, but may well work with other distributions.I didn't really test this under FC2, but under SuSE, it works fine, provided:
Neither of these are an issue for me.
I recently read on the swsusp2 website, that swsusp (version 2, not 1) may actually work with the smp kernel. My one brief test of this didn't work. The system went through most of the suspend motions, but failed near the end of the process. I haven't investigate this any further at this stage.
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