Red Hat 9.0 Upgrade on Dell Inspiron 8200

The Hardware

The Process

I previously described my experiences installing Red Hat 8.0 on my Inspiron 8200. Here I describe my experiences upgrading that machine to Red Hat 9.

Steps:

1. I rebooted with CD 1 in my DVD drive. I took the opportunity offered to verify all three CD-Rs. I selected 2 Button PS/2 mouse. Then I ran an upgrade and let 'er rip.
2. When the upgrade finished (about an hour total), I rebooted to see where I was.

How'd It Go?

1. I expected I might have problems with the video driver. (See my related remarks about the Red Hat 8 installation.)
   1. I rebuilt the nVidia 4496 driver for the new kernel. When I ran startx (I don't use the graphic login screen.), the startup took a very long time, but it worked. However, the mouse/touchpad was frozen.
   2. I dropped back to the VESA driver (and corresponding XF86Config) and ran startx again. This time the mouse/touchpad was functional, though I had the previously reported problems with a screen offset.
   3. I went back again to the nVidia driver. For no particular reason, I started as root and it worked. And the mouse/touchpad worked.
   4. I exited, then started X again as myself, and everything seemed to be okay. Even APM suspend-to-RAM worked.

   However, after using nVidia 4496 for about a month, I decided to revert to 4363. With 4496, the machine would fail to resume successfully relatively frequently, meaning after a couple of days' worth of suspends and resumes. I have not had that experience with nVidia 4363 (as hacked).

2. The next thing I wanted to do was to run up2date to get all the latest patches. But up2date didn't seem to want to start up. I decided to try poking around at other things....
3. I tried to go about my usual business and discovered networking wasn't working well at all. It seemed that I could not connect to any website that used SSL (https:), with either Mozilla or Konqueror. Requests to some other websites never completed.

   To shorten a multi-hour, harrowing story, I decided to download kernel RPMs (2.4.20-20.9) from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/9/en/os/i386 and install them. After I did so, the networking problems vanished.

4. RealPlayer 8 (and 9) does not work. RP8 gets stuck at an flock() system call (as seen via strace). I've only tried a couple of things, but RP 9 (alpha) dies soon after starting to play with a Memory Fault or otherwise misbehaves. I have yet to have it function correctly with any input.

   Note: Sound appears to be working okay otherwise. I can play CDs okay, for example.

5. So far, everything else seems to be functioning well.

Other Notes

• In RH 8, my system was using the wvlan_cs driver for wireless LAN. In RH 9, I'm using orinoco_cs.
• Subsequent to the installation, I bought a firewire disk, and I had mixed results using it. When I first plug the drive in, the system sees it (/dev/sda1, using SCSI emulation) okay, and it works great. However, if I unplug the drive, then plug it in again, the system gets very unhappy. APM suspend-to-RAM continues to work, sort of, but on resume, WLAN no longer works correctly, and the time gets messed up.

Conclusions

My preliminary opinion on the nVidia 4496 driver is that it works well with RH9 (which was not my opinion of it with RH 8).