Fedora for laptops ... Re: Dell Precision M60 LapTop (Built-in Wireless) support

[Ben Steeves]

On Mon, 2003-11-17 at 22:43, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Charles E Taylor IV [mailto:tomalek at mindspring.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 10:32 AM
> > To: fedora-list at redhat.com
> > Subject: Fedora for laptops ... Re: Dell Precision M60 LapTop 
> > (Built-in
> > Wireless) support
> > 
> > I'm using a Thinkpad 570E and this is probably the first Linux install
> > I've ever done where suspend and hibernate work without ANY 
> > tweaking of
> > kernel or apmd scripts.
> 
> you have suspend / hibernate working?? 
> 
> I've not heard about a lot of installs/systems that actually got
> suspend/hibernate support in linux!
> 
> Tell us more about it!

Suspend & hibernate work fine on my Thinkpad T30, using APM (not ACPI --
it stopped them from working and prevented me from reading the battery
settings to boot).  Everything I needed to know I gleaned from this
site: http://www.jamtli.no/t30.html -- unfortunately it appears to be
off-line at the moment.  Basically all it told me was I had to re-create
the hibernation partition after I blew it away installing Linux the
first time.  I assume that if I'd left the hard drive's special
partitions alone when I'd installed Linux, I'd have been able to suspend
without that extra step.

Since then, I created a small (8GB out of my total 40GB) partition and
ran the IBM recovery CD, which put Windows XP back on the machine. 
IBM's recovery tools are very smart in that they'll only ever touch the
first partition on the disk, leaving my Linux installation totally
intact.  At that point, I needed to borrow an external floppy drive so I
could boot a GRUB diskette and install GRUB on the MBR.  Once that was
done I had a fully functional WinXP and Redhat 8 (at the time)
environment.  Now it's WinXP and FC1 (and Win98 in VMware), and working
beautifully.

In previous versions of RH, I had minor problems:

- when plugging the laptop into the dock, the maximum resolution I could
get on my IBM G96 monitor was 1280x1024 (as opposed to the laptop's
standard 1400x1050) -- since upgrading to FC1, this has been fixed.

- on resume from hibernation, xscreensaver would lock X and I'd need to
restart X to get back into graphical mode.  In FC1, this has been fixed.

- after installing FC1, my external mouse (via the dock) and the
touchpad would not work simultaneously.  This was fixed by adding a
stanza to XF86Config for the touchpad -- now both work.

The best thing about the T30 is that all the built-in communications
methods -- WiFi, Bluetooth and the 10/100 ethernet port -- all work in
FC1 without a hitch.  The landline modem is apparently a Winmodem and
doesn't work, but I've never had occasion to use it.

-- 
Ben Steeves                     _                    bcs at metacon.ca
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