Installing SuSE 10 on DELL 6000 Laptop

From openSUSE

Abstract

Setup of SuSE Linux 10 and FC4 on a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop is investigated. Most common issues such as hardware detection and MP3 play back are resolved and are explained.

Hardware detection

Target machine is a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop with Intel915 graphic card, built-in Conexant modem and external PCMCIA modem, Intel2200/PRO wireless network card, and built-in bluetooth.

Graphics card

The graphics card is correctly recognized and set up by Suse. The external monitor, however, is not set up out of the box. To get it working, one should enable "Activate dual head mode" under "Yast--> hardware--> Graphic card & Monitor". Make sure you select the correcrt external monitor from the list.

Getting the external monitor set up correctly under FC4 was a different story. The external display works using i810switch, but flickers so much it is almost impossible to use. My several attempts to fix this issue has not been very successful.

Lid Closing

The only issue with graphic card in SuSE 10 was that closing and reopening the lid, the screen backlight did not turn on.

All settings under "YaST--> System --> Power management --> ACPI Settings were tested, but none fixed the problem. The solution came in the form of editing the configuration file "/etc/sysconfig/powersave/events" manually and changing the following two lines:

EVENT_BUTTON_LID_OPEN="switch_vt" EVENT_BUTTON_LID_CLOSE="ignore"

This seems to have fixed the problem; the screen's backlight turns back on by opening the lid. I did not test it in FC4 but the configuration files, and the fix, should be similar.

Modem

The builtin modem uses Conexant chipset. There is a free driver for the chipset but it is for 2.4.x kernels only. Unfortunately I couldn't find a free driver for 2.6.x kernels. Of course, any proper PCMCIA modem card should work fine under both SuSE 10 and FC4.

Wireless cards

Both SuSE 10 and FC4 recognized the builtin bluetooth device without any problem and I could transfer files to and from my cell phone. With regard to the builtin wireless card (Intel2200/PRO), SuSE 10 detected it out of the box, but I had to install ipw2200-firmware-2.4.-1.noarch.rpm to get it to work under FC4.

As I do not use a wireless LAN, I did not actually use the wireless card in any of the distros. I only went as far as the card being happily detected and reported in working order.

Multimedia

Because of some licensing issues, support for MP3 and DVD is missing from most recent distributions, and SuSE 10 and FC4 are no exception.

There are a number of solutions available, but this is what worked for me (in SuSE):

1. remove multimedia packages like xine-lib, ... 2. download these files: libdvdcss2-1.2.9-1.i386.rpm xine-lib-1.1.1.tar.gz kaffeine-0.7.1.tar.bz2 3. install dvd support provided by "libdvdcss2-1.2.9-1.i386.rpm" 4. compile and install the other packages using following instructions: tar -xzvf xine-lib-1.1.1.tar.gz cd xine-lib-1.1.1 ./configure make install cd .. tar -xjvf kaffeine-0.7.1.tar.bz2 ./configure make make install

now you have MP3 playing and DVD playing functionalities using "kaffeine" command.

A different but somehow related issue was the use of multimedia keys in front of laptop. They could be easily setup in Configue Shortcuts option under Setting menu of kaffeine

The same could be acheived in Gnome by using Control Center, and setting keyboard shortcut for upping and downing volume.

Most of the RPM packages explained here were found in freshrpms.net. A good set of RPM packages for MP3 and DVD playback are:

aalib-1.4.0.0.rc5.4.i386.rpm libdvdcss-1.2.9-1.2.fc4.i386.rpm libfame-0.9.1-7.7.fc4.i386.rpm libXvMCW-0.9.3-1.2fc4.i386.rpm xine-0.99.4-1.2.fc4.i386.rpm xine-lib-1.1.0-1.2.fc4.i386.rpm xine-skins-1.1.0-fc.noarch.rpm mikmod-3.1.6-35.FC4.i386.rpm xmms-1.2.10-18fc4.i386.rpm xmms-mp3-1.2.10.13.2.fc4.i386.rpm xmms-skins-1.2.10.15.noarch.rpm

Have fun!

Contact: habibseifzadeh@yahoo.com