[clug] Linux on new Dell laptops

[Steve Walsh]

Have the same issue with a D410 and Media Base. CDRom is SATA, the live CD's
I can get booting won't allow me to modify the partition table on HDA, some
get to finding a boot media and crap out on finding /dev/sda, and the others
just plain lock up before I can do anything. I can put Ubuntu on it, but x
won't give me anything useful until I plug an external monitor in. I might
try FC4 tomorrow and see what it does.

As for the broadcom and ghost, I used the NDIS2 driver on the CD, pointed it
at the setup file and it works happily first go. Let me know if you want me
to .tar.gz it up and send it across.

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Carden
Sent: Monday, 22 August 2005 6:21 PM
To: linux at lists.samba.org
Subject: [clug] Linux on new Dell laptops


Some M70 and X1 Dell laptops arrived at work today.

First impressions: M70, very heavy. X1, very small and very light.

Mission one, boot to a DOS prompt with networking so I can get Ghost to
image
the hard drive before I mess with it. Bzzzt. Can't seem to build a boot CD
with functional Broadcom gigabit networking.

So, never mind that and on to mission two. Install Linux alongside XP. Not
too
hard on the M70. Boot into Knoppix and run qparted to resize the win
partition. D'oh... don't forget to unmount the drive. Oh, look. It's sda not
hda. Okay, all good. Install FC4. Oh, the graphical installer starts an X
server, delivers a white screen and that's all. Let's do it in text mode.
Okay, looks good. Have to solve that X problem when the install finishes.

Over to the X1. Boot Knoppix. Oh, doesn't work on the USB drive. Let's see.
Suse live CD? Nope. FreeBSD live CD? Nope. Rescue CD? Nope. Where's that
Hoary live CD?

Okay. Looks like the USB drive upsets live CDs. How will I repartition the
beastie?

To be (I hope) continued...

MC
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