Fedora Core 4 - Dell Inspiron 9300
by Paul Wayper
I now have Fedora Core 6 on my own personal Dell Inspiron 6400.
The Inspiron 9300, on the other hand, was a work laptop that is
used predominately by other people in the lab. This meant that I
left as much of it alone as possible and minimised how much of the
machine Fedora Core 4 has of the machine.
What I did:
- Get Inspiron pre-installed with XP from Dell
- Run the System Rescue CD
and use qt_parted to resize the partition table
- Leave hda1 alone
- Resize hda2 (the NTFS partition) down to an appropriate size (I chose to
give FC about 33GB of space
- Create an extended partition in the new space.
- Create a /boot partition (ext2) of about 100MB.
- Create a swap partition (linux-swap) of about 2GB.
- Make the rest of the space into the / (root) partition (ext3).
- Don't forget to commit all your changes and leave it time to write them!
- Reboot and insert the Fedora Core Network Boot CD (only about 6MB of CD).
- I'd previously had to install FC4 across the network for another machine,
so I already had this ready. Basically you need to set up a NFS share of the
ISO files of the FC4 install disks.
- So I then chose a NFS install, used DHCP, pointed it to the correct
machine and NFS share, and away it went!
- Manually configure the disks using Disk Druid and make sure it's got the
partitions correct according to our previous step 2.
- Choose your software packages and install, watching the data flow
gracefully across the network and not require you to change disks at all.
- Finish the install with a reboot and input your user details and
configuration.
- Download your favourite mirror list for your yum repositories and do a
'yum upgrade'.
- To get the wireless networking working:
- Work out what version of the firmware you've got:
dmesg | grep ipw2200
Download that version of the firmware from
http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php
and install it using the instructions provided there.
- Stop and restart the networking services to get the correct firmware installed:
service network restart
- You should be able to start the interface using ifconfig eth1 up and have
it start. You may also need to do a dhclient eth1 to get it to DHCP.
- This was what I can remember of what two very kind people at the Linux
Conference Australia 2006 in Dunedin helped me through to get my laptop working.
I cannot thank you guys enough, whoever you were - I forgot to even find out. LCA
rocks, man - go there and enjoy! You're not guaranteed to get every problem with
your laptop sorted out, but the pool of raw knowledge and talent there means that if
you do have problems, ask nicely, and possibly offer beer, then you can get solutions
to problems you thought you'd never hear answers to.
Problems encountered
- Suspend and resume doesn't really work, but I'm not technical enough (and don't
have the laptop often enough) to be bothered to get it working.
Back to my homepage.
Last updated: 27th October 2006.
