The Setup

This blog is dedicated to my experiences running 64 bit Fedora Core 6 on my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop. My hope is that others will find it useful for setting up their laptops. My goal is to get all the hardware working, preferably in 64 bit mode. A word of caution though: I am not a Linux expert by any means. I only focus long enough to get something working and then I lose interest. So, my posts are not going to be in depth - they'll be more like pointers to help you get started.

This is my first laptop. I wanted a laptop for a couple reasons. The main one is that I occasionally do training and having a laptop that I can plop down and hook up to the projector is very nice; and a lot less nerve wracking. Most training labs run Windows which means I have to transfer my Impress slides and Java programs on to a Windows box from a memory stick and hope to hell they work. Usually they do but when they don't it's embarrassing.

The second reason I wanted a laptop was so I could use the same computer at home and at work. I find it takes a lot of work to get a properly functioning Linux desktop system up and running. With two computers, one at home and one at work, it takes almost twice the effort. As well, from home I can VPN in to work. By using the same computer in both places I can start work right away because all my work files are immediately available.

Reason number two meant I needed a desktop replacement laptop. And I'm cheap, so I didn't want to pay too much. A quck check on Google convinced me that I wouldn't have a whole lot of problems with a Dell laptop. For desktop replacements, the Inspirons and XPses properly configured looked like the best bet. I thought the XPS systems were overpriced for what I needed; they seemed to cater more the gaming/multimedia crowd.

I got an Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 CPU. Since they're only about 15% faster than the Core Duos it probably wasn't cost effective to go with the Core 2 but I wanted one. I also got 2 GB RAM since my work required it. I got a 100 GB SATA 7200 RPM drive. I would have liked a bit bigger hard drive but the larger drives all ran at 5400 RPM. My experience has been that a faster hard drive makes a big difference in system responsiveness. The screen is a 17" WUXGA. At 1920 x 1200 pixels it is awesome! I can finally setup my Eclipse IDE the way I like.

As to the rest of the stuff, here's the output from /sbin/lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility X1400
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
03:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0832
03:01.1 Class 0805: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19)
03:01.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0843 (rev 01)
03:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 0a)
03:01.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 05)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)


So far, I have got the video and wireless network working. It's taken me nearly a month but I work slow. I will upload more posts over the next few days explaining what I've done so far.