I’m getting my supply back. I have my Inspiron setup to boot into the console. The primary reason is actually because suspend modes work best from the console. The other reason is I don’t always need the GUI to get things done.
Of all the laptops I’ve used or at which I’ve looked closely, this has one of the best screens. Not a single bad pixel can I detect, and the 1400×1050 resoultion is truly beautiful. I’m disappointed to find only a single USB port, but I can live with it. Unlike the Ubuntus, Debian Lenny found the CDRW/DVD without any trouble and plays music CDs without a hitch. Sound quality is poor and tinny, but that’s what you get with older laptops.
Here goes the standard tech notes:
Dell Inspiron 4100: 1Ghz CPU, 256MB RAM (currently), Radeon Mobility M6 w/ 16MB VRAM, 20GB harddrive, CDRW/DVD and Synaptics touchpad.
For once, letting X.org do it’s own thing “just works”. The xorg.conf is nearly bare of details, and stuff gets worked out on the fly. I turned off GDM and boot into the console. When I need X, I just start it manually.
The ethernet was read immediately during installation, as was the cheap Linksys WPC11 ver. 4. The chipset uses the rtl8180 driver recently included in the kernel. There are some glitches using it in GNOME, but I had long ago learned how to get it running from the terminal, so I never gave it much thought.
iwlist wlan0 scanning
I choose from the list whatever seems appropriate (usually the local library ESSID):
iwconfig wlan0 essid mplpas
I then run ifconfig to see if it took. If it shows a working connection with the proper ESSID, then I turn on DHCP:
dhclient wlan0
If I get a lease notice, I give it a minute, then run with it. It’s probably not the proper way to do things, but it works. I have yet to plow through the documentation to run any kind of WPA supplicant stuff because I haven’t needed it.
To make life easier on the console, I set the boot parameter of vga=834 to get the oddball 1400×1050 resolution. I installed the Terminus fonts for the console, and added GPM. I ran dpkg-reconfigure to add the final parameter of -2 so the touchpad can use mouse paste with the right-button. I’m also trying to wean myself of the addon mouse habit, and regain my keyboard skills.
Running s2disk works perfectly, as long as I unplug everything and drop to the console. For s2ram I have to add the parameters -fspr.
Everything else just seems to work as it should.
