Inspiron 5150 - Some questions regarding hardware and misc.

zer01 · n00b Joined: 27 Oct 2003 Posts: 4

Hello. Ive just ordered an Inspiron 5150 N3060VT (51501IA) laptop with these specs (see below). Ive decided to partition the harddrive into 3 partitions:

1. Windows XP disk - 5GB
2. Gentoo Linux - 15GB
3. NTFS, storage - 40GB

My questions are; will all my components work with Gentoo? If not, wich? I can live without some of them since I will also run XP... Perhaps a silly question, but I want to be sure, does Gentoo support NTFS?

Any suggestions regarding my partitioning is welcome

Specs:
- Sound Blaster Pro kompatibel 3D Lyd
- Smart Lithium Ion Batteri
- Intel® 845-PE chipset, 533 MHz
- 2 USB 2.0, 1 PCMCIA, 1 Firewave IEEE 1394, S-Video(TV-Out), VGA
- Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 prosessor - 3,06GHz
- 15,1'' SXGA (1400 x 1050)
- 256MB DDR RAM/333MHz (1x256MB)
- 24x/10x/8x/24x CD-RW/DVD Combo internal
- 60GB Ultra DMA/ATA 100
- nVidia® GeForce FX Go5200, 64MB DDR
- Internal combo 56k modem / 10/100 network
- Internal mini-PCI TM 1300 802.11 b/g Wireless

Im new and if this works out, I will probably stay here. Thanks in advance, I read it was a top notch community

xr31Daisy · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 10:25 am Post subject:

1. Hardware : I've got an Inspiron 8200, and most of it works (including CD Writing, sound, Accelerated 3D. Firewire), except :

internal modem : I never tried (but the network adapter works fine ).
ACPI, suspend to ram and suspend to disk : I'm still trying to get that.
Internal wireless card : mine is a TM1180, but the problem with the TM1300 is the same. It isn't supported under linux, yet. Your solutions are either to wait for the driver ( development is under way here ). Or you can try the Linuxant solution ( works for me ).

2. NTFS : Nope, NTFS isn't supported in linux ( read-only is available, but writing to NTFS is really unsafe). If you really must have a Windows partition, FAT32 would be a better choice. ( My personnal choice was to get rid of XP )

3. Partitions : you'll need at least also a swap partition ( that's 512MB for your setup ). And you'll find quite a lot of threads about partitions in these forums ( about things like separating /boot, /home, /usr, /var ... )

zer01 · n00b Joined: 27 Oct 2003 Posts: 4

Thank you. Sounds good enough. I kinda want to get rid of XP as well but I have to get adept with Gentoo first, and now and then I play some games

So I guess I will make it a FAT32. I am aware that I need a swap partition, that was going under 2. Gentoo Linux.. But dont know the dis/advantages by separating it into /boot, /usr, /var etc.. But hopefully Ill learn something by looking into them threads

zer01 · n00b Joined: 27 Oct 2003 Posts: 4

BTW:
Wich one of I386 and I696 must I use for my laptop? A bit unsecure.. Im guessing I386. But I dont know why

I kinda tought it had something to do with the chipset, but I figured I have no idea hehe..

axses · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Mar 2003 Posts: 110

the hsflinmodem package works on the inspiron 5100 , try it when you get the
laptop.

axses · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Mar 2003 Posts: 110

you should use i686

see the documentation in make.conf

klarnox · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 7:00 pm Post subject:

zer01 · n00b Joined: 27 Oct 2003 Posts: 4

Ok thanks. I will never use the modem but.. some day if I get really bored and have nothing else to do, I will try it

In other words; I doubt I will ever try to make the modem work... But thanks anyway

axses · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Mar 2003 Posts: 110

http://www.euro.dell.com/downloads/emea/general/nl/Inspiron5100Reviewersguide.pdf

enjoy :-)