Last updated Jun 30, 2007 1:53 pm GMT-5

Gentoo GNU/Linux on Dell D810 Laptop

Features I Have Working

• Dual-booting with Win XP
• Ethernet
• Wireless LAN (basically)
• X with 2D and 3D acceleration, and tolerable mouse feel (fortunately very tweakable)
• Audio
• CPU frequency scaling (speedstep)
• openvpn with multiple clients

Config files

• kernel config for 2.6.14
• /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 - Assumes all the listed packages below are installed, and the above kernel config.
• grub.conf
• xorg.conf Assumes ati-drivers and synaptics packages are already installed.

Packages to emerge

• ati-drivers
• acpi this is a command-line interface to the power management features that works like the old "apm" command. If you didn't use the apm command, you don't need this. I'm used to it.
• acpid
• powernowd enables the speedstep stuff, great battery savings.
• hotplug
• coldplug
• ipw2200 needed for the wireless card.
• ipw2200-firmware
• dhcpcd
• pcmcia-cs
• alsa-utils
• wpa_supplicant (haven't used it yet)
• wireless-tools (WEP works fine as long as I specify the ESSID)
• quickswitch (for setting up and switching between wireless networks ... on second thought, it doesn't provide for detecting available networks, bah.)
• synaptics ... better driver for the touchpad.

Boot services

These are useful things that aren't on by default. Enable each one by doing rc-update add foo default.

• acpid
• powernowd
• coldplug
• hotplug
• alsasound

3D setup

Once all the above is installed you must do one more thing:

     opengl-update ati

Wireless setup

Currently I'm using quickswitch. The config file was pretty easy to sort out. This means I no longer use /etc/init.d/net.* at boot time; quickswitch takes care of starting and stopping network interfaces. So instead, I added this line to /etc/conf.d/local.start:

     /usr/bin/switchto -s

There are some annoyances...

• local usually runs last, and some other boot services I've added (ntp-client) need to run after networking is set up. So I had to edit the depend function in /etc/init.d/local like so:

        depend() {
        #      after *
               after modules pcmcia alsasound netmount
        }
  

... and then edit /etc/init.d/ntp-client like so:

      depend() {
            before cron portmap
            need net local
            use dns logger
      }

     That seems to do the trick.

Openvpn with multiple clients

Not specific to this hardware but i wanted to note this somewhere... to get this working on gentoo, check this thread

Features I Do Not Have Working Yet

• Auto-detect of available wireless networks.
• Disabling the "joystick" buttons. I only ever hit them by accident... again, annoying as heck. The synaptics driver has an option for this, but it doesn't work for me.

In Progress

Better Wireless Network management

I'm trying to install wifi-radar. First of all it's not marked stable yet, so I have to add "net-wireless/wifi-radar ~x86" to /etc/portage/package.keywords.

Then while installing gtkglarea, it hits a stupid libtool glitch related to opengl drivers for which the workaround is:

       sudo opengl-update xorg-x11
       sudo emerge gtkglarea   
       sudo  opengl-update ati

... and then I can continue to emerge wifi-radar. To avoid running it as root, I chowned the config file (/etc/wifi-radar.cfg) to the wheel group and gave wheel write permissions.

Now I just have to figure out why my wireless card is no longer there on eth0. iwconfig can't find it anymore :-\

Evolution / Exchange

Evolution running against an Exchange server basically sucks, but I have it more or less working with the crappy Exchange server at work. Very often, the options screens for account setup won't let you put in the server info. The solution was in this thread on the gentoo forums , you have to do things in exactly the right order:

     1. make sure you have use flags "ldap" and "kerberos"
     2. emerge evolution-data-server
     3. emerge evolution-exchange
     4. emerge evolution 

Still haven't got the stupid global address list working, tomorrow will try the suggestions in this thread

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