Fedora Core 3 Install on Dell Inspiron 8200

The Hardware

Processor1.8GHz Pentium 4 M
BIOSPhoenix BIOS A10
Display15" SXGA+ (1400x1050) @24bit
Video Card32MB DDR 4X AGP NVidia NV17 (GeForce 440 Go)
RAM512MB DDR 266MHz (2 DIMM) SODIMM
Hard drive40GB, 5400RPM; Hitachi DK23EB-40
Floppy driveDell
Fixed optical24X CD-RW/DVD combo; Samsung CDRW/DVD SN-324B
Modemv.92 56Kb internal softmodem; PCTel 2304WT V.92 MDC
LAN10/100Mb LAN; 3C920 (3C905C-TX compatible) controller
WLANDell TrueMobile 1150 wireless mini-PCI (has Agere MPC13A-20/R chip)
FirewireIEEE 1394 (Firewire/i.Link); TI OHCI Compliant controller
USB2 slot USB 1.0; Intel 82801CA/CAM
PCMCIA2 slot; TI PCI-4451 controller
AudioCrystal WDM Audio Codec (Cirrhus Logic CS 4205)

The Process

I previously described my experiences installing Red Hat 8.0 and Red Hat 9.0 on my Inspiron 8200. Here I describe my experiences installing Fedora Core 3 on that machine. (I did not do an upgrade.)

Bottom line summary: The system looks great and runs great after a few tweaks, but ultimately I abandoned it and went back to RH 9, because I could not get suspend/resume to work at all satisfactorily.

Installation Steps:

  1. I booted the machine with FC3 CD 1 in my DVD drive. I took the opportunity offered to verify all the CD-Rs. (A good thing, too! My CD drive wrote multiple unreadable CDs, and I had to burn the bad ones again on a different machine.) I did a graphical Workstation install and chose all the defaults that the install presented me. I configured my network interfaces, etc., as part of the install process. Then I let 'er rip.
  2. When the install finished (about an hour total), I immediately ran up2date and updated everything, including the kernel. The update went well, though it took awhile.
  3. I rebooted to see how the install/up2date went.

How'd It Go?

For the most part, things went quite well. The first thing I did was to change the entry in /etc/inittab to set the run level to 3, not 5, so I suppressed graphical login. I expected to get poor screen resolution when I started X, and I did.
  1. I downloaded and installed the latest nVidia driver (6629). Once I followed the install instructions and tweaked the xorg.conf file (replacing XF86Config), the screen looked wonderful.

    I had to fuss a bit to get the system to load the nvidia module. I don't understand why I needed to do this. I did not have to do so for RH 9.

  2. The mouse/touchpad worked out of the box. Unlike in RH9, the Mouse System Preferences screen actually adjusted the touchpad's response, and it "stuck".
  3. Sound works great out of the box.

Suspend/Resume

I just could not get it to work. I got suspend to work, but resume left me with a non-functioning machine. After a process of elimination, I eliminated the video driver and (I think) the wireless driver as culprits. I turned off ACPI and turned on APM (acpi=off apm=on in grub.conf configuration. In the end I concluded there was something odd happening with the disk controller or drive, because it seemed that, after resume, the system locked up with the first physical disk access.

Because I consider suspend/resume to be essential for my use of the machine, I reluctantly had to abandon FC3 and go back to RH9.

Other Notes

Because it was well down on my list of interests, I never determined whether I could get the softmodem to work.

Conclusions

Installing FC3 went very well. I'm impressed. But I'm very disappointed that I could not get suspend/resume to work and that I had to abandon FC3 in favor of RH 9.

Links

My /etc/X11/xorg.confxorg.conf

TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones

Dave Kristol, dmk-yahoo@kristol.org
Last modified: 15 January 2006
$Id: i8200-fc3.html,v 1.2 2006/01/15 18:41:21 dmk Exp $