It works, but needs some flickering at the moment. If you have any hints to how I can make this laptop work better or any other comments to this page, please email janfrode@tanso.net

RedHat 9 needs to be installed from CDROM or separate PCMCIA network card, since the internal broadcom gigabit NIC isn't supported (yet).

Drivers to make the internal broadcom card work can be downloaded from

These are GPL'ed, so they will hopefully appear in a standard kernel soon.

[BUG] The internal Dell TrueMobil 1400 doesn't work, and probably woun't work for a while.. :(

The BIOS didn't want to give XFree86 more than 832KB memory and resolution of 640x480, so a small hack was needed:

I put this into /etc/rc.local:

echo "FIXME: Stealing 32MB memory by possibly dangerous BIOS hack"
sleep 1
/root/855patch/855patch 32768
sleep 3

This might be dangerous, but it worked for me.. Hopefully, if it's a safe hack, it will be included in the XFree86 driver.

I also upgraded to the latest kernel (2.4.22-pre8) to get better support for the Centrino chipset. Not sure if this was strictly necessary..

I'll try to look into power management and other features of the laptop later, and post my findings here.

ACPI

Rebuilt a new kernel (2.4.22-pre9) with ACPI support. Installed acpid, chkconfig apmd off, chkconfig acpid on. Made a simple /etc/acpi/events/power looking like:

event=button/power.*
action=/usr/local/sbin/power.sh "%e"

And /usr/local/sbin/power.sh containing:

#! /bin/sh
/sbin/halt -p

Restarted acpid, and tried the powerbutton. Nice!

The suspend-button sends a button/sleep to ACPI, but doesn't do anything. Need to figure out what it should do here… I tried to tell it to go into sleep state S1, but the monitor didn't go off. Had to push the powerbutton to get it back on.

[BUG]: Closing the lid sends a button/lid to ACPI and turns off the screen automatically. To get it back on I have to switch between X and console-mode using Ctrl-Alt-F1/Ctrl-Alt-F7.

The volume buttons doesn't send anything to ACPI. Looks like these are sending normal keycodes and need to be programmed that way.

Todo: