ChrisWeyl/DellInspironB130

I'm installing FC5 on a Dell Insprion B130 laptop, and, not finding any pages on point out there, figured I'd write these notes up. I'm installing it on a machine whose owner is more along the "How do I turn this thing on again?" variety than the "Dude, you KNOW I never use XWindows", so I'm going to keep the configuration as simple as possible.

Lacking a better place (a la the ThinkPad wiki ), I'm plunking this here for now. This document in no way represents the views of anyone but me, myself, and my business associate I. This document is very much a work in progress right now.

Status at a glance

= The Hardware =

It's a pretty standard Dell Insprion B130 laptop, less than a month old. 60GB drive, 512MB RAM, DVD-R/CD-RW drive, internal wireless, etc, etc. lspci output is below.

= The Software =

The base s/w install is FC5. I'm using the "respin" DVD from the Fedora Unity Project, but it really shouldn't matter if the base DVD is used.

Partitioning
The hard drive comes with 3 primary partitions:

1. hidden, utility 1. NTFS, the XP install 1. hidden, the "image restore partition"

Oddly enough, there are 8 megs of free space in between partitions #2 & 3, as well as between #3 and the end of the drive.

Since I'm trying to keep things simple (and avoid questions like "hey, why isn't the boot menu working!), I decided to try to not mess around with the partition layout more than I really needed to. I did a custom partition scheme:


 * Left partitons #1, 3 alone
 * deleted #2
 * recreated #2 as 100MB, /boot (ext3)
 * Created #4 in between #2 & 3 as extended
 * ~1GB swap partition in hda4/extended
 * remainder to / in partition in hda4 (xfs -- ok, I couldn't resist a little geek)

In other words: [cweyl@NO ~] $ sudo /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot     Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/hda1              1           6       48163+  de  Dell Utility /dev/hda2  *           7          19      104422+  83  Linux /dev/hda3           6904        7295     3148740   db  CP/M / CTOS / ... /dev/hda4             20        6903    55295730    5  Extended /dev/hda5             20         150     1052226   82  Linux swap / Solaris /dev/hda6            151        6903    54243441   83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Grub
I'd read elsewhere that some dell machines tinker with the active flag as part of the "swap to disk" process. It was advised to write grub to the /boot partition rather than the MBR, so I did that. No problems booting. This should also have the happy incident of allowing the utility menu to continue to function.

= Post-Install =

First-boot
The firstboot process did not identify the sound driver correctly. Wireless also appears to be silent. More below.

I left SELinux at "Enforcing". I'll judge from the volume/occurrence of screams later if this was a good idea or not.

Update + other repos
First thing was to do a yum update; despite using the respin DVD less than a month old there were still 244MB of updates to download and install.

Second thing was to configure for access to the Repository Which Must Not Be Named, for Reasons Which Must Not  Be Named. 'nuf said.

Third thing was some additional yum plugins, from extras. These will help keep things in sync, etc, etc:


 * yum-fastestmirror
 * yum-changelog
 * yum-fedorakmod

= Hardware Configuration =

Here's the lspci output from the box:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03) 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02) 02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

Ethernet (wired)
Not a problem. Recognised from the moment the install DVD booted.

Ethernet (wireless)
After a little poking around, I discovered that the wireless device (BCM4318) was indeed supported -- for whatever reason the bcm43xx module was not being loaded automatically. Apparently this driver is a relatively recent addition to the kernel. The bcm43xx project page contains some interesting bits of information.

The bcm43xx-fwcutter package is needed. Reading the README.Fedora included in that package, it becomes readily apparent why the module doesn't load -- we need to "extract the firmware from the official drivers". Ugh. I won't repeat what it says to do here, just do it :) There's also a tracking bug for this driver at BZ#186329 .  Also of direct relevance is this note, and.

Here's to hoping the Repository Which Must Not Be Named puts out a firmware package for this driver soon, a la ipw2100-firmware.

Update: After sporadic success/failure with this device, I finally gave in and just bought an Intel IPW2200 miniPCI card to replace the Broadcom. Installation was a snap, and fully functional (after installing the ipw2200-firmware package from livna). For $25, it was well worth it.

You can order it at newegg here.

DASD
/dev/hda access can be juiced up by inserting /sbin/hdparm -u1 -c3 /dev/hda in /etc/rc.local.

Video
This was tricky. The B130 has a widescreen display with an optimal resolution of 1280x800. Unfortunately, the intel video BIOS does not list this mode, and the current xorg driver will not display modes that the video BIOS does not report. Fortunately, there's help in the form of a tool called 915resolution, which overrides the BIOS mode settings in RAM allowing one to use "non-standard" resolutions. (Note 915resolution is not in extras yet, but hopefully soon will be: BZ#194566 )

I chose to override the 1280x1024 resolution, in part because that's how the README.txt did things :)

[root@NO ~] # 915resolution 38 1280 800 24 Intel 800/900 Series VBIOS Hack : version 0.5.2

Chipset: 915GM BIOS: TYPE 1 Mode Table Offset: $C0000 + $269 Mode Table Entries: 36

Patch mode 38 to resolution 1280x800 complete

I also plugged the command into /etc/rc.local, so it would be issued at each boot.

Sound
Soundcard is apparently an Intel STAC9200 chip. This has issues... Card is apparently detected and module is loaded correctly, but no sound. See BZ#182940.

Update: Update to kernel 2.6.17-1.2139_FC5, and sound starts working.