Dell D400 with Mandrake Linux
Linux on Dell Latitude D400
System description
My Latitude D400 is a 1.4ghz machine, with an external DVD (connected
through a connector that combines USB and power mains in one port) that
appears as a USB mass storage. No floppy drive.
Distribution
I installed Mandrake 9.2 without any problems (first I put my money on Suse 9.0
but it did not support the network interface out of the box and I did
not have the installation cd's). The standard 2.4.22-mdk kernel worked
like a charm.
I just downloaded the ISO images (3) using my desktop box and burned
them on CD-R. Inserted the first CD, turned on the Dell and pressed F12
for Dell's boot menu, where I chose the DVD drive. It did auto-detect
the sound, network and video without a problem. However, I did have to
install the video hack mentioned on Jan Frode's description. For completeness sake, here are the urls:
- http://www.chzsoft.com.ar/855patch.tar.gz
- http://www.mail-archive.com/devel@xfree86.org/msg02247.html
ACPI
At first, ACPI was not working. I tried compiling a 2.4.25 kernel, and
a 2.6.3, but all to no avail. In the end, I looked in /etc/lilo.conf,
and bluntly removed the 'acpi=ht' boot option. That fixed it, and now I
can happily monitor the remaining battery capacity. CPU throttling does
not seem to work yet, I'll look in to that later.
Todo
Mandrake's graphical boot progress indicator does not
work, due to the fact that the kernel can not set a graphics mode on
boot-time. This is not a big problem as the kernel boots perfectly
without the fancy screen.
Concluding remarks
Ok, so it's just 30 minutes ago that I
installed it and started playing around. If I find any problems (and
hopefully, solutions), i'll update this page. So far so good, Mandrake
team: thumbs up!!
Contacting me
You can contact me by email on latitude@sonologic.nl (spam will be ignored automatically).
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