Fedora Core 2 on Inspiron 9100

The new driverloader for Fedora Core 3 installed without the usual nasty sounding (but harmless) error messages. I just deleted the old rpm and installed the new one, and it worked.

Another note (1/11/05): You might want to stop reading now and go here, but I am leaving this because I did a few things differently.

Original description starts here

I did a clean install on a new computer. This Inspiron 9100 is a top-of-the-line Dell "desktop replacement." It is huge. It has a huge screen. It is perfect for using around the house, carrying from room to room with a wireless connection. Not ideal for travel, when you want to travel light. But really not all that bad. I use it on the train.

In general, I got what I wanted from the combination of the latest-and-greatest laptop with the latest-and-greatest Linux distribution: blazing speed; incredible power; crystal clear display; lots of neat features; and plenty of fun getting it to work. I am now using my new laptop in preference to my (perfectly good but 2 year old) workstation.

In general, the installation went well except for failure of Anaconda to recognize the ATI driver. I first did it with the final test release, then upgraded. But I don't think this was fixed by then. The odd thing is that the driver is actually supported in the 2.6 kernel. (And ATI has a Linux driver, which I was warned not to use so I didn't try it.) The installation did work well enough with a generic LCD so that I was able to use the computer. But, be warned: don't do any time-consuming configuration of fonts and window sizes until you finish getting the display working properly.

Display

For displaying on a projector, what works (so far, on several projectors) is to just plug in the projector after starting X. The only problem is that the shape of the screen isn't right. To fix this, I opened Firefox (using the View menu to remove everything possible from the top of the screen) and shaped its window to cover the external display. I use Firefox to display slides, but you could do the same thing with OpenOffice or xpdf.

Wireless

There are two ways to use the windows drivers on Linux: Ndiswrapper and Linuxant. Ndiswrapper, which is free and open source, didn't work for me, although I didn't try everything possible. Linuxant costs about $20, which I gladly paid (twice) after I got it to work, with the help of their tech support people (person?) who respond(s) by email within a day.

The problem with Ndiswrapper was, I think, the 4k Stack "feature" of the 2.6 kernel. I don't understand this too well, but I think by using a smaller stack, you can run more processes. But I don't think this is something I really want to do that much. And it really louses up many wireless chips, as well as some Nvidia video drivers. (The attitude of the kernel developers is that the companies involved will change their products to support the 2.6 kernel. Perhaps this is a good attitude, but I didn't want to wait.)

What works is to configure driverloader with the command:
dldrconfig --enable-workaround=stack
The BCM94306 has a whole series of drivers written for it. Some came with my computer. (You have to unzip the exe files.) Some were linked from the Ndiswrapper site. The one I'm using was recommended at the Linuxant site, by clicking the link on Drivers, which takes you here. The one I got was for the Dell TrueMobile 1300 (even though this is what Dell calls 1350). The one I used is R74092/IR/bcmwl5a.inf, but others probably work.

Power management

Acpi is configured in the directory /etc/acpi, which contains actions/ and events/. The events directory has the following files, each preceded with its name.

The section in small print was written before I made a few discoveries. I leave it because it explains some things that might be useful later. Read on for the discoveries.

I got some scripts here from Diego Santa Cruz, in particular his tar file at http://ltswww.epfl.ch/~dsanta/resources/soft/acpid-events-0.3.tar.gz. Most of it did not work for me, but I could get the suspend file to work somewhat. Here is my version, with my comments labeled JB:

#!/bin/sh

# Load config
if [ -f /etc/acpi/actions/functions ]; then
	. /etc/acpi/actions/functions
else
	exit 1
fi

if [ ! -f /proc/acpi/sleep ]; then
	echo "ERROR: ACPI support not present" 1>&2
	exit 1
fi

LOCKFILE=/var/lock/subsys/acpi-suspend

if [ -f $LOCKFILE ]; then
	pid=`cat $LOCKFILE`
	wall "ACPI suspend requested but previous suspend process still going (PID $pid)"
	exit 1
fi

# Check that suspend would be OK
check_suspend_ok || exit 1
# Start suspend process
echo $$ > "$LOCKFILE"
screen_power off
# Perform APM configured suspend settings
"$APMSCRIPT" standby user
sync
# spin_disks_down does not work now, but I have hopes (JB)
spin_disks_down
# Suspend - this works - it slows the processor (JB)
echo -n "7" > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling
echo -n "7" > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU1/throttling

## Resume back to normal - removed by JB

I also removed the resume part of it and put that in a separate file called resume as follows:

#!/bin/sh
# Load config
if [ -f /etc/acpi/actions/functions ]; then
        . /etc/acpi/actions/functions
else
        exit 1
fi
 
if [ ! -f /proc/acpi/sleep ]; then
        echo "ERROR: ACPI support not present" 1>&2
        exit 1
fi
 
# Resume back to normal
"$APMSCRIPT" resume standby
screen_power on
rm -f "$LOCKFILE"
rm /var/lock/subsys/acpi-suspend
echo -n "0" > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttle
echo -n "0" > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU1/throttle

I have not yet put resume on a button. Instead, I simply type "resume" on a command line, and I put the following line in my .cshrc: alias resume "su -c '/etc/acpi/actions/resume'"

The suspend script blanks the screen, reduces the processor speed, and turns off the network, but you can bring the screen back with any key. The computer does not go to sleep, but the processor slows down a lot. You can see this if you you just try the two "throttle" commands and then try to do anything. This reduces the load on the battery and reduces the temperature.

The resume script takes a few seconds. It brings back the network and resets the processor to normal speed.

Possibly all the benefit of this is in the two throttle commands and the screen blanking. I've now put these on the lid action, so I think I get all the benefit from closing the lid, which does not shut down the network:

What I discovered was the following. I read /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state to see the rate at which the battery is discharging. I experimented with various changes. I found that changing the speed of the processor (throttling) did absolutely nothing. Blanking the screen reduces power use by 20%. So I removed the lines that are commented out below about throttling. In sum, there isn't much to be done with this kernel except to blank the scren.

The computer also has some power management features built into the BIOS (and partially controllable through it). The screen dims when it isn't plugged in, and CPU0 and CPU1 are throttled by some apparently random amount (approximately 50% on the average).

USB memory chip

I followed these instructions, and they worked except for actually using the thing. The directory that gets made is called
/mnt/diskonkey,
and to get it to work I actually had to mount it by saying
mount /mnt/diskonkey,
and of course
umount /mnt/diskonkey
when I'm done.

I have a sneaking suspicion that none of this did any good and the thing would have worked anyway, given that the directory is not the one I used and it did not get automounted. So my advice is just plug the thing in and see if you can find it before you do anything.

Other issues

Booting: Because the power management doesn't work perfectly, I have to boot more often than I would like, so I sped up the boot process by removing things that I don't want, with chkconfig --levels 345 [whatever] off (or just removing them completely): rpcidmapd, nfs, nfslock, netfs, rpcgssd, rpcsvcgssd, rpcidmapd, irda, isdn, and winbind, cups, kudzu, mdmpd, sendmail, cpuspeed, and mdmonitor. This leaves (in rough order of booting): syslog, irqbalance, portmap, random, pcmcia, autofs, smartd, driverloader, acpid, sshd, xinetd, gpm, crond, xfs, anacron, atd, readahead, and messagebus. I think that getting rid of netfs and nfs was what produced most of the benefit, but I'm not sure. The bootup is much faster now.

Fonts: I added /usr/share/fonts/Type1 and /usr/share/fonts/local to the font path, using chkfontpath. This allowed me to use the Bitstream Vera fonts with Xemacs and my terminal window. (They look nice, and the clear distinction between 1 and l is useful.)

Cursor: I found the large cursor under Preferences/Accessibility/Mouse keys. This is very helpful with high resolution. There is also a preference for the cursor to blink when you hit Ctrl.

Path: I found the following useful as an addition to my .cshrc: setenv PATH "/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:${PATH}"

Installing Fedora Core 2 on a Dell Inspiron 9100