[clug] Linux on new Dell laptops

Andrew Over andrew.over at cs.anu.edu.au
Tue Aug 23 00:01:49 GMT 2005


On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 06:20:44PM +1000, Michael Carden wrote:

> 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.

I've got an Inspiron 9300, which AIUI is fairly similar to the M70, and
based on that, I think you'll need to hunt around for some kernel patches
to get suspend/resume working.

2.6.12 and friends have an issue where the config of devices behind a PCI
Express bridge were not properly saved (google for a thread involving tg3,
ACPI S3 and Shaohua Li).  Without a fix, S3 resume is horribly broken for
all devices behind the bridge.  There may also be an issue with MSI
registers too.  Shaohua Li seems to be behind most of the fixes in this
area. 

libata also doesn't (yet) interact well ICH-6M.  The ATAPI support is
disabled by default (unless you edit include/linux/libata.h); apparently
its still pending a few fixes, but seems to work well enough to play DVDs
for me.  The (complete) fix is due RSN.

It also has no support for S3 suspend/resume, so without patching, S3
resume is fairly fatal.  IIRC Jens Axboe posted a patch to fix this, but I
don't think Jeff Garzik has anything "official" yet Google for libata S3
resume.

People have reported success getting S3 to work on the M70, though I've
had no luck on my 9300, and am stuck using suspend to disk (even if I try
the nv driver rather than nvidia).  Let me know if you have any trouble
tracking down those patches, and I'll see if I can dig them up.

Cheers,
--Andrew


More information about the linux mailing list