Linux on the Dell Inspiron 1100
Author: Nicholas J Kreucher; March 23, 2003
please don't email me for support... I don't own one myself
Touchpad, no parallel or serial ports, only one PC card slot. If you have one and want to put Linux on it, this page might help.
Service Tag: 39MSK21
Distribution: Red Hat Linux 8.0
Hardware: lspci (-v)
listing, cat of cpuinfo
Video
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp. 82845G/GL [Brookdale-G]
Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)
The video is an Intel(R) i830 Extreme Graphics chip model 82845G
with hardware 3D support (tuxracer runs nicely!). Physical screen size is
1024x768 and I used 16-bit depth. Drivers are not included with Red Hat 8.0,
but Intel provides them and they are easy enough to install. You'll need
development stuff installed (gcc and kernel-source packages) as it recompiles
the DRI module for the running kernel.
http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/linux/graphics.htm
As it seems, the driver is not 100% perfect... sometimes (actually alot of
the time) when you boot up the machine X will come up and then crash. The
video chip seems to barf and it takes a reboot to fix it. I've noticed that
booting to Windows first, then rebooting to Linux makes things better.
Ethernet
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device 4401
(rev 01)
It's a Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 Ethernet controller. Again, drivers
do not come with the distro, however drivers do exist. They are hard to find
so I have version 1.0.1 saved on this site for you to download:
To install, simple untar the source, enter the src directory and do a "make
&& make install". Keep in mind if your kernel gets upgraded
(like via up2date) you will have to repeat this process!
Next just make sure you add an eth0 alias entry in /etc/modules.conf:
alias eth0 bcm4400
One big bummer is the driver has no MII support, which means the mii-tool
that Red Hat's network scripts use to test if there is a link will not work.
The concoquence is that on bootup, if you enable the interface at boot time,
it will have to wait for dhclient (DHCP client) to timeout before it gives
up. If the driver had MII support, then the system could tell right away
there was no cable plugged in and skip past trying to up the interface. This
could also be a hardware limitation of the chip... in any case, you're sol!
Maybe you will be creative on a solution; the wait on bootup w/o an ethernet
cable connected might start to get to you =) You could, of course, not start
the eth0 device on bootup and enable it manually via Red Hat's nifty "Network
Device Control" gui (or with ifup/ifdown, if you please).
Next time you reboot kudzu will detect the new hardware and ask you to configure
the network interface, or you can do this yourself w/o rebooting by running
/usr/sbin/kudzu or redhat-config-network manually.
APM / Suspend
Can't get it to work yet... also apm seems to think the machine has no battery
and is always connected to AC.
Modem
Haven't looked into this yet...