[PLUG] My Dell Inspiron 5100 has bios revision A28...

David Phillips dave at crisponions.com
Sun May 2 13:59:08 UTC 2004


On Friday 30 April 2004 1:39 am, Michael Robinson wrote:
> Looking for information on how to get Redhat 9 working correctly on it,
> the only patches I'm seeing on sourceforge are for bios A26 and A02.

I dont know if its any help but I have had experience installing RH9, fedora 
1, knoppix and gentoo on my Inspiron 5100 (yes I am an install junkie).  RH9 
was awful and I never did get it quite working right, I belive I got acpi 
working using a 2.4.24 kernel from kernel .org, but never got the patches for 
the redhat kernel to work.  Fedora was a bit better, ACPI was already patched 
in the kernel, getting OpenGL and DRI working was easier but still not great.  
Knoppix ran everything out of the box perfectly, I really enjoyed using it, 
but then I discovered gentoo.  Gentoo is probably my favorite distro I have 
used so far, if you are brave enough to conquer the install (The knowledge 
you will gain is invaluable though) everything works out of the box, the 
documentation on their web site is very thorough, plus I dont have to worry 
about dependency problems anymore (gentoo takes care of that for you).  
>
> Logging out under X is not working.  Do I need an acpi patch for the
> 2.4.26 kernel?  How about a dsdt patch?  Anyone know how to get the
> screen to turn off when it's closed?
>
> I have found that a number of people put Debian on these, but when I
> looked into the Debian site it warned about compromise.  The Woody
> install cd seems to be using a 2.2 kernel.  Maybe the stable version is
> too old?!?!?  What version do I want?  I'm working on getting Fedora
> down, but it's huge for one thing.  I figure it should support 2.6
> smoothly and that there's a higher likelihood since it's newer of it not
> locking
> up.
>
> How do you compile the driver for the Radeon grpahics chipset?  Do I
> just need the pristine source from ftp.kernel.org?  My attempts
> to use 2.6 on my desktop P4 gave me something bootable, but I couldn't
> get X going.  Do I need the framebuffer driver, or just the
> XFree86 4 dri driver?  Do I need to compile the radeon dri driver as a
> module?  Do I need the source for X to compile the dri
> driver?
>
> What is the difference between Redhat's kernel source and source from
> ftp.kernel.org?
>
>      --  Michael C. Robinson
>
>
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