This information is provided to let you know how I configured my laptop to work with Linux; it is provided with no warranty at all under any circumstances. If you break your laptop trying anything listed below don't whine at me about it.
Important Note about Fedore Core 1 vs Redhat 9
I have replaced Redhat 9 with Fedora Core 1 on this laptop. To my great pleasure everything works with the exception of the internal wireless card. The only modification that was needed was to add "acpi=on" to the gurb configuration. Unless you have some insatiable desire to hurt, this is likely a better solution.
General Notes
I have installed Redat 9 on this laptop. This of course means I will be assuming a Redhat 9 installation here and will mention the portions I had to manipulate to get the laptop functioning.
Almost everything on this laptop has "just worked" by default in Redhat 9. The notable exceptions include the internal wireless card, detailed below, as well as power management. I did have to recompile the kernel to gain acpi power management. So far I am very pleased with this laptop.
My Configuration
The following is the listing of the parts of the 600m that I purchased. Yours of course may be different.
- I600M,14.1 IN SXGA+,1.4 GHZ,W/32MB VID
- 384MB,DDR,266MHZ 2 DIMMS,I600M
- 30GB HARD DRIVE, I600M 30GBPP
- RESOURCE - CD WITH TOOLS
- INTERNAL 56K MDM AND NIC
- 8X DVD DRIVE,I600M
- INTEL PRO 2100 MINIPCI WIRELESS CARD,INS
- 48W PRIMARY BATTERY I600M
- 48W ADDITIONAL BATTERY I600M
XFree86
XFree86 version 4.3.0 is set up correctly during the install. I have included the configuration file I am using. It is important to note that I don't use XFS so if you are this file will have to be adjusted a bit.
DRI seems to work with the stock Redhat kernel, unfortunately this must be rebuilt to get acpi working correctly.
Current XF86Config configuration file.
Sound
lspci reports the sound card as Intel Corp. 82801DB AC'97 Audio (rev 01). The i810_audio module works flawlessly, so far.
Kernel
In order to get ACPI working the kernel needed to be recompiled. I got the latest stable kernel (2.4.21) and the corresponding ACPI patch from acpi.sf.net. Here is the config file I arrived at after many attempts.
I am currently working on changing the DSDT the kernel uses, none of the attempts thus far have resulted in the batteries listing their information correctly. They show 47950 mW vs 48000 mW.
PCMCIA
PCMCIA works without any changes using "yenta_socket".
Power Management
Since rebuilding the kernel ACPI handles power management quite well. I do not have hibernate set up yet and will likely use the software suspend kernel path.
Internal Ethernet
The ethernet device is detected correctly using the "tg3" module. The following line was added on install to the modules.conf file.
alias eth0 tg3
Wireless
This is an Intel Pro 2100 mini-pci card. This unfortunately contains the Broadcom chipset. It is not currently supported. I am using a pcmcia wireless card until this device is supported.
USB
USB just works by default. The following lines were added to the modules.conf on install.
alias usb-controller ehci-hcd alias usb-controller1 usb-uhci
Disk
I purchased the 30 GB drive as I didn't need the extra space or particularly care about the disk performance, it is a laptop after all. The following is the hdparm information from the drive.
Currently I am using the following hdparm line, this is not the best performance this drive has seen. When running the Redhat kernels the drive performed slightly better, this is due to the patch for some new ID's that the original kernel had vs 2.4.21. It's not enough for me to track this patch down currently.
/sbin/hdparm -X udma5 -S 240 -d1 -u1 -m16 -c3 /dev/hda