Introduction
This is a record of my experiences with my Dell Inspiron 8200 (8k2) covering; initial installation, configuration, upgrades, and daily usage.
Being a Unix contractor working on various customer sites, I had a requirement for a desktop replacement, as apposed to just a laptop, to take with me wherever I went. It had to be robust and reliable enough to cope with a 10 hour a day, 5 days a week work load. My previous laptop, an Inspiron 7500, performed very well with my Unix system administration tasks and development work. However, recent forays into GL, KDE and Java were beginning to swamp the poor old 7k5. So, time for a new machine !
Specification
CPU 2.0 GHz P4 Mobile RAM 512Mb Disks 60Gb + 20Gb Video 64Mb GeForce4 Go Display 15" UXGA media DVD/CD-RW combo Initial checks
Assembling all the bits was as simple as ever. First impressions of the laptop straight out of the box: -
- Appearance - Trendier look.
- keyboard - An improvement over the 7k5. Nice tactile response.
- XP pro - Yeuk ! Eventually got around the nanny hand holding to be able to setup an ethernet link to my old 7k5 !
- Display - Much better, viewing angle much increased.
- DVD - perfect; none of the occasional 'jagging/stutters' as seen on the 7k5
- Video - loaded MDK2 to get an impression of performance; results (using GL,1600x1200,32bit colour) was an impressive 45 FPS ! Although some of the surfaces were placed incorrectly and some of the hidden surfaces were displayed, the overall results were impressive. The problems with the surfaces were resolved by an initial patching/upgrading of the BIOS, XP pro NVidia drivers, and MDK2.
- XP pro filesystem - NTFS, Oh dear ! See below
Having checked everything out and being very impressed with the laptop's performance whilst running MDK2, even if it did only use 32 of the available onboard 64Mb of graphics RAM, serious benchmarking would have to wait until I had Linux installed…
Linux installation
Installing linux on my laptop meant either RedHat or SuSE as this was a fairly new machine and these distro's have good support for laptops, plus NVidia were actively supporting these distros with rpm'd accelerated XF86 drivers. I have used both before and this time I decided to go for SuSE, only because at the time, SuSE 8.0 with linux 2.4.18, was the later release.
First of all, go shopping !
- 3-button mouse - Avoid that dreaded 3-button emulation ! I got a cheap and cheerful Logitech USB Wingman.
- Partitioning tool - Microsoft have still not released the APIs for the NTFS filesystem … So the options would be to either completely remove XP pro, re-install XP pro using vfat instead of NTFS, or purchase a tool to perform the re-partitioning of the disks. I got a copy of Partition Magic as I have need of XP functionality (E.g. DVDs, for now …) and I did not fancy doing an XP installation !
Initial Installation issues
- Partioning -
Unable to use the usual fdisk with XP's NTFS disks.- DVD Installation -
Installation via DVD fails.- Default init level -
installation defaults to level 5- Booting linux -
hangs at 'loading PCMCIA module'- Booting from 'other' boot partition. I.e. XP pro -
hangs- CDROM failure -
/dev/cdrom 'device not found'- Network link -
Ethernet throughput running at 7Kb/sec ?!- X - NVidia drivers -
SuSE installation only has a 2D driver for the NVidia GeForce4 Go.Upgrade history
mp3 player Philips hdd120 (mp3 jukebox; usb, grip, id3, cddb) Apr 2004 Canon EOS 300D Canon EOS 300D (digital usb camera; gphoto2, hotplug) Jan 2004 VPN VPN - remote access to client's site via the Internet Jan 2004 - Jul 2004 GPRS Vodafone mobile connect card Oct 2003 SuSE 8.0, 8.1, 8.2,
9.0, 9.1, 9.22002 - 2005 NVidia 2960, 3123, 4191, 4394, 4496, 5328, 5336, 6106, 6111, 6629 2002 - 2004 KDE 3.0.4,
3.1, 3.1.1, 3.1.3, 3.1.4,
3.2, 3.2.1,
3.3.0, 3.3.12002 - 2004 Kernel 2.4.19, 2.4.20, 2.4.21, 2.4.22, 2.4.23,
2.6.0, 2.6.1, 2.6.2, 2.6.3, 2.6.4, 2.6.5, 2.6.6, 2.6.7, 2.6.8, 2.6.8.1, 2.6.9, 2.6.102002 - 2005