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Gentoo (Linux) on a Dell Inspiron 8600 w/ ATI Mobile Radeon 9600 Pro

Here are some things I hope will help someone if they're still struggling to make their i8600 work with Linux.

At this point, there is nothing technically not working (save the APIC, which isn't a huge loss (enabling it, last I tried, caused a lockup.

This Box Has

base Insprion 8600
with serial & parallel port; later models lack this
Bluetooth - USB
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 413c:8000 Dell Computer Corp. Works fine with (I believe) the generic USB Bluetooth driver.
Various basic bits
Pentium-M 1.7GHZ w/ 1MB cache, 60GB 7200RPM hard drive, DVD+-RW (+ for burning, +- for reading), parallel, serial
Broadcom 4400 10/100Mbps ethernet
No problems-just using the b44 driver in the stock kernel
USB
2 available ports, 1 UHCI the other OHCI. (though 4 are in the system; likely in use for bluetooth)
Intel IPW2100 WiFi
Using the stock ipw2100 driver in the vanilla (main) Linux kernel. It works great if you've an open access point or with WEP. I cannot, however, get it to work reliably with the University of Iowa's fascistic wireless authentication scheme (notably, Mac users also seem to have similar problems!) I can get it to authenticate with wap_supplicant, but eventually the link drops. I cannot get it to work with xsupplicant.
ATI Mobile Radeon 9600 Pro
Works 100% with the proprietary ATI drivers, including powersaving. Unfortunately, as of last I checked (several months ago), these still do not work reliably with software suspend. The XOrg drivers work 100% with software suspend (both suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk) but they don't support powersaving nor 3D acceleration.
D-Link DWL-G650
This is a PCMCIA card. I can get it to authenticate reliably to the UI Wireless network. The procedure is outlined on my wireless page. This uses the madwifi-ng drivers.
Suspending to disk/ram
I use the software suspend 2 patches from Nigel Cunningham et al. Provided I'm not using the ATI drivers, suspend and resume works perfectly. I have a 2GB partition set aside for suspend2.
Note on PCMCIA support
A special modification to /etc/pcmcia/config.opts is required, or else pcmcia-cs will lock up the machine when it looks for pcmcia cards. Vanilla pcmcia drivers are used.

The kernel config file.

To make pcmcia not lock up, you need the following change at the top of the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file:

     #include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0x800-0x8ff, port 0xc00-0xcff
     include port 0xfe00-0xfeff, port 0xfd00-0xfdff
     include memory 0xc0000-0xfffff
     include memory 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff, memory 0x60000000-0x60ffffff

Page last modified Sunday, 16-Apr-2006 14:38:14 EDT