FC3 on Dell Inspiron 8000

[Wal]

My experiences with FC3 on a Dell Inspiron 8000, with ATI 128 m4 mobility, 15 inch display-

The Inspiron 8000 video and display really like to operate at 1400 x 1050 depth 24.
I have had problems with other settings with several OSs.

The anaconda GUI install process tries to use a video setting that does not work for
this (and probably similar) laptops.  I use text install and before bringing up the newly
installed system, I use rescue or Knoppix to edit the xorg.conf settings to use-

        HorizSync    31.5 - 90.0
        VertRefresh  59.0 - 75.0
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth     24
                Modes    "1400x1050" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
NOTE- I may not have the best settings.

I guess the anaconda mini-x stuff would need to use the 1400x1050 24 settings for the
gui to work for this device.

I installed the rawhide from 20040912 (kernel 541).  It is working quite well-
using wlan-ng for wireless with a Linksys WPC11 v3 with WEP shared keys.
I got the orinoco driver to work also, just used iwconfig essid and enc
to set the WEP - with orinoco, sometimes I had to down and up the card twice - seemed like
cardmgr was too fast or too slow.
I had 2 USB drives in at the same time - worked great - they were
physically pushing against each other, but so-what - the udev worked
fine - I have gotten used to doing: eject /dev/sda1
Compiled some packages I use - no problems.
Really like that Firefox is already there and relatively current.
Wish Firefox was "by default" on the toolbar next to Mozilla.

The sound settings were at bottom (off), which is sorta nice.  Simply had to
use kde mixer to adjust the sound level.

Haven't tried to power saving stuff yet.

The sendmail daemon also seems so slow when booting - sometimes several minutes
Since I dont need it, I disabled it.
In fact, I disabled a lot.
Was surprised to see auth (port 113) active - disabled it.

Oh, I installed everything - used ftp.  I did not have rpms for some packages, so
I made a copy of a very small valid rpm and gave it the name skippackage.rpm
and then did symbolic links when the installer complained about a missing rpm.
The retry would succeed.  Crude, but effective.  Finally wrote perl script to
go against the .listing file and create any need links.
It would be nice to be able to select everything and deselect packages via regular
expressions.  Probably ought to be using kickstart (ks=).




		
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