Dell Inspiron 8100 on Red Hat 9

The Dell Inspiron 8100 is a top-of-the-line, awe-inspiring laptop. It has an amazing list of features, some of which I still have not tried out. Furthermore, Red Hat and nVIDIA have each done their part to make installation a painless process.

Hardware

This laptop came with a Pentium III 866 MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM, a 20 GB hard drive, a 15 inch Ultra XGA TFT active-matrix display with 1600x1200 resolution, a combo DVD CD-RW drive, an onboard ethernet card, and an onboard modem. The video card is a nVIDIA GeForce2 Go with 16 MB of RAM. The complete list of specs can be found on Dell's Web site.

Note that the sound card, onboard ethernet card, combo DVD CD-RW drive, RCA out (video only), monitor port, USB ports, and IR port all worked without any fuss. Hatem Achouri sent email explaining how to get the internal Win modem to work. I have not gotten around to playing with the suspend feature. All in all, I have a very workable setup, and for an old Linux laptop user such as myself, I was very pleased to see things go so smoothly!

The laptop is not perfect, however. I have heard of a number of people who have had their hard drive die on them. In fact, it happened to me as well. Although replacing the hard drive is quite easy, it is still quite an inconvenience. I also occassionally have problems with the screen "acting funny" (presumably due to a bad connection). This is easily remedied by putting the laptop on my lap (as if I were about to type something) and slapping the right-side palm rest. ;-)

Video Card

During installation, select "nVidia GeForce 2 Go" for the video card and "Generic laptop display panel capable of 1600x1200" for the monitor. I think it is also important to select the maximum resolution, "1600x1200", otherwise the LCD will interpolate the lower resolution in a suboptimal fashion.

Those who do not care about accelerating X or getting hardware OpenGL support may skip the rest of this section. Otherwise, it is necessary to install nVIDIA's fantastic driver. The driver can be downloaded from nVIDIA's Web site. The README.txt is quite complete and helpful. The gist of it is:

1. Download NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4363.run from the above link.
2. In /etc/inittab, change "id:5:initdefault:" to "id:3:default:".
3. Now, get out of X, perhaps by rebooting, and run:

   sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4363.run

4. In /etc/X11/XF86Config:
   1. Change 'Driver "nv"' to 'Driver "nvidia"'.
   2. In the module section:
      1. Make sure you have 'Load "glx"'.
      2. Make sure you do not have 'Load "dri"' or 'Load "GLcore"'.
   Those who use an external PS/2 wheel mouse as I do can simply use my XF86Config file.
5. Try it using "startx". If it works, exit X, and continue.
6. In /etc/inittab, change "id:3:initdefault:" back to "id:5:default:".
7. Now, get back into X, perhaps by rebooting.

You should now have a beautifully functioning X server, perfect for 3D gaming umm, I mean... working on open source projects! Just to test out the driver, try running tuxracer--this game is unacceptably slow without hardware OpenGL support. If you have questions, please consult nVIDIA's README.txt.

Once logged in, it is helpful to open the font preferences dialog and select "Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)". Also, click the "Details" button and change the resolution to something higher if the fonts are too small.

Email Received

Here is a collection of helpful email I have received from other Dell Inspiron 8100 owners. In some cases, I have edited the email to make it more appropriate for Red Hat 9:

Feedback

I look forward to receiving comments. I can be reached at jjinux@yahoo.com.

Author

Shannon -jj Behrens