40.67 Dell Latitude C600 (Inco)
Inco is a laptop with a docking station, used as a shared portable, primarily for presentations (but previously as a desktop machine). It has a built-in network card and modem plus another network card in the docking station. It is a dual boot machine, although MS/Windows-NT doesn’t see much use. Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r2 was installed from CD-ROM, 20 November 2001. It was upgraded immediately to unstable. The kernel was upgraded to 2.4.14 early on but has keep up to date with Debian kernel releases. The built-in modem is a WinModem which is not supported by Linux so a PCMCIA modem is used.
Inco has two NTFS partitions (C and D drives) using about 7GB with the remaining 13GB partitioned as 1GB swap and 12GB for linux:
40.67.1 Inco Specifications
From the lspci and lshw commands and
/proc/cpuinfo:
| Spec | Details |
|---|---|
| Machine: | Latitude C600 A16 |
| CPU: | Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 1.0GHz/700MHz |
| Bogomips: | 1400 |
| Memory: | 512MB |
| Network: | 3Com 3c905C Tornado (docking station) (3c59x) |
| 3Com 3c556 10/100 Mini PCI Adapter (3c59x) | |
| Disk: | 18GB TOSHIBA MK2017GAP, ATA DISK drive (/dev/hda) |
| Video: | Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x 64MB 66MHz (ati/r128) |
| Audio: | ES1983S Maestro-3i (maestro3) |
| CD/DVD: | LG DRN-8080B, ATAPI 24X DVD-ROM drive |
| CDRW/DVD: | Samsung CD-RW/DVD-ROM SN-308B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive |
| Modem: | 3Com Mini PCI 56k Winmodem |
| Hostname: | inco |
| Domainname: | togaware.com |
| IP Address: | 105.229.8.156 |
| Netmask: | 255.255.255.192 |
| Broadcast: | 105.229.255.255 |
| Gateway: | 105.229.8.190 |
| DNS | 125.83.72.15 125.83.72.1 |
| Boot: | Grub |
| Kernel: | 2.4.22-1-686 |
40.67.2 Inco Install Log
The basic install chose the qwerty/us keyboard. The disks were partitioned as 12GB for a linux partition (hda3) and 1GB for swap (hda4). Root was mounted from /dev/hda3. The kernel was installed from CD-ROM with devices selected including fs/autofs, fs/nfs, fs/nfsd, fs/ntfs, fs/vfat, net/3c59x, misc/psaux and net/ppp. The network hostname was identified as inco. The base system was installed from CD-ROM. Configuration involved setting the timezone to Australia/ACT with the clock not set to GMT (since it is dual boot). Initially skipped the “Make Linux boot directly from hard disk”, but created a boot floppy. A Cusomt Boot was chosen and the system was rebooted.
The built-in network card is eth1 when docked and eth0 when undocked. See Section ?? to handle this.
Install i8kutils to control the Dell Latitude CPU fan,
volume buttons, and Fn-keys, and to report CPU
temperature. Includes a little applet to include a
CPU temperature in the gnome-panel. You may need to load the module
i8k. (By the way, i8k stands for Insperion 8000.) The command
line i8kctl lists the current status of the fans.
Lilo was configured to boot MS/Windows/2000 by pointing it to /dev/hda1. Later, lilo was replace with grub for booting.
Sound card support from the kernel required adding the following line
to /etc/modules.conf (by adding it to
/etc/modutils/sndconfig then running
update-modules:
Refer to documentation in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/
for details.
The video card has TV-Out but ATI is not supporting Linux on this yet, unlike NVidia which supports TV with its XFree86-4 option:
Currently on Inco I have:
which tells it to use whatever the BIOS recognises as connected (either CRT or FP).
At one time I had a problem playing videos with xine. Starting xine on Inco displayed just a blue screen, even when the video is playing. If I choose the video driver to be xshm it works acceptably. Ogle fails to start also, although mplayer coped. The problem was running with 16 rather than 24 bpp X server!
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