How to make Linux get along with your Dell Latitude LS




Notice

As of September 2000, I no longer use a Latitude. I have a Sony Vaio now. So the data on this page may or may not be very out of date. I do my best to put up new info when I get it, but since I no longer have a machine to test on, I can't guarantee the accuracy of anything. I will note when posting something that someone else wrote though.

So my work gave me a Latitude LS to play^H^H^H^Hdevelop on. These machines are pretty damn cool. This page should help anyone who is in the possession of one of these quickly get a linux system up and running.

Hardware
(or why it's worth blowing $3000 on of these)

Here's a quick rundown of the hardware that my particular model has:
Installation
(or how I came to hate ZZTop

Installation of Linux on this laptop was painful. The laptop comes preinstalled with Windows98, which of course i have no need for. So i grabbed a cd and went to work. I used a very stock install of Redhat 6.1. RH automagically detected the external cdrom and floppy, and everything was fine until i started to partition off the drive.

begin rant

Here's what I found. The default partitioning scheme is three 2GB logical dos partitions. ewww. So i went to erase them. "That's odd," I thought. "fdisk won't remove the partitions. Hmm. I'll try booting into DOS and doing it there." No such luck either. It turns out that Dell ships all of their computers with 'hidden' partitions on them that dont show up on the partition table. These partitions can be accesses with the DOS command "zztop". I can't blame Dell, and i kinda like ZZ Top, but how annoying is this? The end result is that i mangled my hard drive's partition table to the point of no return. I called Dell, and they offered to ship me a new one. I specifically requested a clean hard drive. 2 weeks later when the next-day shipment showed up, the hard drive was exactly the same. Grrr. Dell, if you're listening, please don't continue this practice. Hiding partitions on a hard drive is a bad business practice.

end rant

Solution? Deleting the DOS partitions makes is impossible to use the save-to-disk feature. This doesnt particularly bother me, but if it bothers you, you should leave Windows98 on the first partition, and use the other two for Linux.


XFree86 Configuration
(or damn the default xserver looks ugly)

This machine uses a NeoMagic256AV chipset. Redhat 6.1 doesn't ship with the correct drivers. Uggh! So you need to install the correct X server to make the graphics less ugly. Download it (and an updated list of cards for XF86Setup) here. This is the XF86Config file I use. I get 800x600 at 24bit color depth. The server seems much faster at 16bit depth, but I'm not playing q3a, so the difference doesn't really bother me.


Sound Configuration
(or why it makes no sense to share the same RAM between the sound card and the video card)

Update
Many people sent me email letting me know that the sound module wouldn't work. More specifically, anyone with the A03 bios (watch when you boot) can't load the module without freezing their machine. I emailed back and forth with the anonymous maintainer of the NM256 module, and ended up pointing out a bug to him that he immediately fixed. Unfortunately, neither him nor I had access to a Dell with the "broken" bios. Yesterday, I recieved an email from someone who has had some luck with this:

I actually ended up driving to the offices of 4Front Tech, the people who put out the commercial OpenSound drivers. The president, Dev, sat down and debugged my Latitude LS and got the Neomagic chip to work. The next version of OSS/Linux will contain a patch that enables the Neomagic NM2200 chip to work fine on the Latitude LS.

So the moral of the story is that if you have the newer bios, you'll need to wait for the next OSS to come out. I'm not sure whether this is the free version or the commercial version though.

As of 2.2.14, the kernel includes support for the NeoMagic 256AV sound card. To make this work, you must recompile your kernel with sound support and NeoMagic 256AV support as modules. If either of these are built into the kernel, everything will go to hell. The other catch is that sound must be initialized before the video is (ie, before X starts). Otherwise, the video card will steal all 2.5MB of RAM and deny the sound card any access. Yuck. Here's a rc script i use to handle this:


I symlink this to /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S85sound, and everything is happy.

Networking

To use the built in NIC, you merely need to enable it in your kernel (you are using a custom built kernel, aren't you?). Basically, enable Ethernet, enable 3COM cards, and enable the Vortex/Boomerang series:
APM

Here's what i turned on/off in my kernel configuration for APM:

Modem

There now exist several ways to make the worthless software modem work under linux. This seems to be the main source of info, although the site is down alot. I recommend checking the cached versions on google. This is the official Lucent docs on the chip set. This is another page about windmodems and linux. So is this. Thanks to Darren for the heads-up.

more coming soon

-jon at divisionbyzero.com

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Last modified: Wed Dec 6 12:34:10 PST 2000