Installing RedHat 7.2 on the Dell Inspiron 8200

Mike Dowling / Politas
3-Sep-2002

System Specifications

Installation

Started by blowing away existing Win XP Pro installation and reinstalling from scratch, using smaller partition.  Set up XP in 1 10GB partition, witha  seperate 1GB ntfs partion for XP's swap file to live in (a personal habit).  Then a 20 GB VFAT partition for storing mp3 files and any other data I need to swap between systems.  Very impressed with Dell's system install disks, they give you a full copy of XP and a seperate driver disk, instead of a single "system restore disk".  This could be regular procedure for WinXP, though.

Red Hat 7.2 installed onto the high end of the disk; no problems booting.  It seems that the days of making sure your boot partition is at the start of the disk is a thing of the past. Chose the Grub bootloader, and it did nothing to harm WinXP's bootup, apart from adding an extra step, of course.

Red Hat detected the built in network card, AC97 sound and my USB mouse perfectly. Happily mounts the 20GB vfat partition, but the ntfs driver seems to have been left out of the standard install.Doesn't seem to be on the CDs as an RPM, either, so I guess I'd need to compile a custom kernel if I want to be able to read the WinXP partition direct.  Couldn't be bothered with that.

XFree 86 Hassles

As seems to be standard procedure for Dell laptops, X would not work off the bat.  XConfigurator could not probe the card at all.  From the Linux on laptops site, I discovered the need to get specific nvidia drivers.  I used the NVchooser script to confirm my choice of kernel driver (I needed to use the i686 version) and installed the two RPMs successfully.  I then tried again to get XConfigurator to set everything up, but it failed miserably.  I was concerned that all the documentation on the NVidia site describes the driver as being for assorted GeForce cards up to the GeForce 3.  Since I was using a GeForce 4, would it work?

Next step was grabbing XF86Config-4 files from the Linux-on-laptops site.  The first one that had results (after much tweaking) gave me only a 640x480 resolution, which was completely unacceptable.  I ended up trying just about every XF86Config file from the 8100 pages, eventually finding one that gave me the proper 1400x1050 resolution, though unfortunately, also gave me a german keyboard layout.  That was easily fixed, though, and so here is my working config file: XF86Config-4.txt (Stupid Geocities made me add the extension) .

Untested

I hadn't tested the CD burner, nor DVD playing, before I had to return the laptop, though DVD-ROMS mount perfectly.  I don't expect there would be trouble with the burner, though, given comments from others on the Linux-laptops site.
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