Novell SUSE 9.2 with kernel version 2.6.8-24.11 on a DELL Inspiron 500m laptop


This info provided "as is". Use it at your own risk, I'm not responsible for any result caused by the use of this info.

First of all, I'd like to point your attention that this is my first SUSE installation. For many years I was using Mandrake distribution. If you're looking for Mandrake installation tips for DELL Inspiron 500m, you should try this link http://www.dsatkhan.net/~dan/dell/dell.html. One of the problem I had with Mandrake is that I could not get Mdk version 10 to work properly with new IPW Intel driver. So I decided to try SUSE. The SUSE 9.2 has been installed from the DVD source from French “Linux CD” magazine, issued in March 2005.

During the installation screen colours were too weired to see anything, except buttons “Accept” and “Next”. Nevertheless, it required nothing except these buttons to be installed. The first boot ended up in 800x600 resolution. Not good! However SUSE itself realized the issue and suggested me to adjust settings in something called SaX2, whatever... After few clicks and reboot, I was able to work in LCD 1024x768 mode.

All hardware was detected properly, at least in YaST “Hardware Information”. But there was a little problem with Wireless card “Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter”. YaST could not install wireless because ipw-firmware was missing. Interesting enough the search in YaST found no references to “ipw”. I explained this for myself as a limitation of ISO image distribution. I had to connect cable to “Dell 82801BD PRO/100 VE (MOB) Ethernet Controller” and start searching on the Internet. The best friend google forwarded me to http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/professional/ipw-firmware.html. Then I found one of the mirrors of the SUSE ftp://ftp.solnet.ch/mirror/SuSE/i386/9.2/suse/noarch and opened ipw-firmware-3-3.noarch.rpm in SUSE default browser Konqueror 3.3. This allowed to install the rpm directly from web. After that YaST network devices easily enabled the wireless card and allowed me to setup SSID and hex WEP key.

Just for the reference, please find the dmesg file.

The main laptop controls are working properly: icon in the right low corner shows the power status (battery/power cable), screen lid works ok. Pressing Power button results in SUSE shutdown as it should be.

Unlike Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 works extremely slow, especially when resolving names. I noticed the same thing in Mandrake 10. Very strange. The problem appears to be in IPV6, to disable it type about:config in the address bar and enable “network.dns.disableIPv6”. The final touch was to update online the SUSE with recent patches, again the YaST is the place to do it.

In general I'm quite happy with SUSE. It required no 3rd party patches or deep customization to work on DELL 500m platform.

If you have any comment or suggestion please drop me email to dsatkhan at yahoo.com.

Good luck,

Daniyar Satkhanov

12 March 2005

PS:
This report is listed at TuxMobil - Linux on laptops, notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones.

Linux On Laptops