linux on 6000

[siriusly]

i am thinking about putting linux on my dell inspiron 6000 and i am wondering which version is the best to put on my laptop

[abf]

seeing as you are a total linux newbie (or at least as it seems by this post) I would highly recommend Ubuntu (if you want gnome) or PCLinuxOS (if you want KDE). Both of those usually "JUST WORK" and are pretty laptop friendly.

If i am mistaken and you indeed know linux, then Gentoo is probably your best friend. Or if you wanna arrange your own funeral, LFS is always there;)

but yeah... Ubuntu and PCLOS get my votes.

[Delvien]

i run Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my I6000d right now and its fricken awesome, everthing but the wifi light works out of the box

[siriusly]

yes i am a linux newb and i wanted to know how to install it on my machine. do i just run the program or just do a clean install w/ xp on the hard drive?

[abf]

download the iso

burn it to a cd using Nero or Alcohol

put the cd in the CD drive

reboot. Enter bios settings (usually either Esc, F1, or F2) and make sure that the cd loads before the hard drive. Save and Exit.

Reboot with cd in drive. On welcome screen, press enter.

Follow onscreen instructions.

During "Set up hard DisK" step choose either "Use Entire Drive" to erase windows and have just linux, but better yet, select "Custom Parition Drive" (or something like that) and set up your partitions in such a way.
-shrink NTFS (windows) partition by about 15 or 20gb (or anything else you want)
- create a new swap partition. make it twice as big as your ram (so if you have a gig of ram, make it 2gb)
- create a new /boot parition. make it ext3 (crucial, other partition types will give you grub problems later) make this one about 100mb
- create a new / (root) partition. make if raiserfs, and take up the remaining free space.

keep coninuing the onscreen instructions.

it will ask you to restart, do so. then you ahve to wait again about 10-20 minutes until it sets everything up. then it will welcome you with a log-in screen.

at this point, check what hardware works, and waht doesn't, come back on the forms to report your findings and we'll help you get the rest up and running.


(the above was the install procedure for Ubuntu)

[siriusly]

so basically wut u r sayin is that it only works if i have only linux on it and not to have both xp and linux
i want to be able to have xp so that i may cs when i want to

[seablade]

Uh read this part of what he typed again...


but better yet, select "Custom Parition Drive" (or something like that) and set up your partitions in such a way.
-shrink NTFS (windows) partition by about 15 or 20gb (or anything else you want)
- create a new swap partition. make it twice as big as your ram (so if you have a gig of ram, make it 2gb)
- create a new /boot parition. make it ext3 (crucial, other partition types will give you grub problems later) make this one about 100mb
- create a new / (root) partition. make if raiserfs, and take up the remaining free space.


In other words setting up a dual boot is no problem.

Seablade

[abf]

In other words setting up a dual boot is no problem.

Seablade


:thumbup:


in other words, 90% of us here dual boot.

i only single boot my desktop (mandrake 2005), but my laptop is dual XP / Xubuntu. I go to XP for gaming or if i wanna use standby. and then go to xubuntu for everything else. setting up dual boot is easy, most distros do it automatically, your job is to just set up partitions and let 'er rip. once you get good with linux, then you can make fun tweaks with your bootloader such as add colors, background pictures, add/remove entries, and all that good stuff :)

and if you are wondering, standby works for me in linux in general, its just the ati drivers that are crap and give me (err..everyone) issues with standby, so if you ahve an ati card, don't count on it. nvidia is for sure the way to go with linux :thumbup:

[egalus]

i run Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my I6000d right now and its fricken awesome, everthing but the wifi light works out of the box

Did you manage to get the wifi light to work at all? For me it is not just not running out of the box, I haven't found any way to get it working at all.

[Delvien]

Did you manage to get the wifi light to work at all? For me it is not just not running out of the box, I haven't found any way to get it working at all.

its a known bug right now that the wifi light does not work, and will not work untill one of the DEVs fix it. I've tried some various "hacks" to make it work but to no solution. As for everything else, what are you having problems with ?

[egalus]

Delvien:
Did you manage to get linux to use only the same or even less amount of power than windows uses with your i6k?
I tried everything I can think of (undervolting like in windows, activating the default=off powersaving of the wlan-card, speedstep at 800 MHz) and still linux in idle uses 8% more power than windows idle (same lightsettings, no swapping or anything, just plain desktop sitting there).
As I try to get maximum batterylife out of my laptop atm I am still using windows as linux just can't compare to windows in powersavin terms.
The worst are the wlan drivers, with wlan turned off (on win and linux) it's down to 4% difference.

[sirfergy]

I rarely get the light to work on XP, so I'm not sure it's that big a deal it doesn't work under Ubuntu. :)

[siriusly]

-shrink NTFS (windows) partition by about 15 or 20gb (or anything else you want)

how do i shrink the partition. does that mean reformat the drive and partition it smaller or is there a way where i can shrink it wit out doin all that, if so i didnt know u could do that after u create the partition.

[seablade]

If you are using anything other than Microsoft tools, most of the better ones will let you resize a partition without having to reformat the original.

Make SURE your drive is defragmented before this though, otherwise you might shrink the partition and lose some data that is off at the end of it due to fragmentation. Obviously make sure oyu have space on the drive as well.

Seablade

[abf]

yep.

pretty much defrag first. then run gparted (or qtparted) of a livecd, or Partition Magic if you have that installed, and it will let you reformat to your wishes. I believe the generic ubuntu paritioner has that too, but don't quote me on that, since i never had to change my table with ubuntu, only reformat the linux partitions i was about to use.

[Delvien]

Delvien:
Did you manage to get linux to use only the same or even less amount of power than windows uses with your i6k?
I tried everything I can think of (undervolting like in windows, activating the default=off powersaving of the wlan-card, speedstep at 800 MHz) and still linux in idle uses 8% more power than windows idle (same lightsettings, no swapping or anything, just plain desktop sitting there).
As I try to get maximum batterylife out of my laptop atm I am still using windows as linux just can't compare to windows in powersavin terms.
The worst are the wlan drivers, with wlan turned off (on win and linux) it's down to 4% difference.

Try the new ATI drivers . with powerstate settings, i can get about 3 hours on a ful charge (6 cell battery )with brightness all the way down. With brightness on high i get 2 and a half hours.

Refer to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=119394&highlight=ATI



As for power consumption.. Linux takes more , try a app called EMIFREQ, it can lower your CPU usage down to 800 mhz, I havent discovered how to undervolte in linux without hacking the kernel which i dont want to do.

[drizek]

i would recommend kubuntu for that laptop simply because you will have it working 100% on first boot. PCLOS might work as well(most likely it will, but i simply havent tried it yet), but ubuntu is just a guaranteed success.

[abf]

i would recommend kubuntu for that laptop. <snip> but ubuntu is just a guaranteed success.


here is a thing, go with Ubuntu (not Kubuntu or Xubuntu or Edubuntu for that metter). Just plain old Ubuntu.

The answer does NOT lie in the desktop that is used, but more in the overall package. Kubuntu, (Hoary and Breezy) are known to be plagued with Kubuntu-specific bugs that don't exist for Ubuntu. The good news is that the kubuntu team is working very hard to make sure it is FINE for the Daper Drake release (6.04).

And here are quick reasons against edubuntu and xubuntu):

Edubuntu - includes a lot of extra networking and file sharing stuff made specifically for LAB WORK. Educational tools you don't need.

Xubuntu - although great, and with just a few tweaks much faster (and stable) than regular ubuntu, still xfce is not a noob-friendly as gnome is, and also notice i said it will require tweaks (although not hard, still not for a first time user) (<===== coming from a current Xubuntu user and a 4 year linux "experimenter")


as for PCLOS... i am sure it will work just fine. So if you want a KDE desktop, go PCLOS (not Kubuntu). Also the beauty of PCLOS is comes bundled with Nvidia and ATI drivers, just make sure to get the pclos.0.9.2_ati.iso (or whatever its called) and you'll have fglrx configed from the get-go, no confusing and often difficult fglrx setups.

[egalus]

Try the new ATI drivers . with powerstate settings, i can get about 3 hours on a ful charge (6 cell battery )with brightness all the way down. With brightness on high i get 2 and a half hours.

As for power consumption.. Linux takes more , try a app called EMIFREQ, it can lower your CPU usage down to 800 mhz, I havent discovered how to undervolte in linux without hacking the kernel which i dont want to do.

As I don't play with my laptop I took the i6k with integrated graphics (to get more batterytime) ;) so new Ati-drivers won't work for me ;)

You have to patch the kernel to undervolt, yes, works great.

Instead of Emifreq I use powernowd, another speedstep daemon, but as I said, runtimes are compared at same states, idle, 800mhz fsb, 0.7v corevoltage, same lightsetting, same lansetting.
And it's the calced time and the powerconsumption reported by the system that differ in 5-8% which leads to me still using windows.

[siriusly]

i have a 40 gig hard drive in my laptop and i was wondering how much i should partition the drive to have linux running smooth and have xp running smooth to.

i know that xp needs a minimum of 6 gigs so i would prolly make it like a 10 gig partition and use the rest for linux. what do u guys think?

[Delvien]

i have a 40 gig hard drive in my laptop and i was wondering how much i should partition the drive to have linux running smooth and have xp running smooth to.

i know that xp needs a minimum of 6 gigs so i would prolly make it like a 10 gig partition and use the rest for linux. what do u guys think?

Windows 15, the rest use for linux. ( thats my setup ) but with a 80gb hd.

[Delvien]

i would recommend kubuntu for that laptop simply because you will have it working 100%


to my experience, KDE in ubuntu actually makes your CPU temp go up, your system will actually have less battery life, and stay hotter. Maybe this is just my experience.

[egalus]

If you want to dualboot and want the most out of your harddrive I suggest
1 windows partition (around 10 GB - only programs, no data)
1 linux installation (with more than one partition - around 10 gb without data too)
the rest in one big ext3 partition which holds the data for both windows and linux, for that you need to use ext2ifs to mount that partition on windows.
That way you have no problem using almost all of your harddrive on both systems and can even share thunderbird and firefox settings in both osses without redundancy in data.

[abf]

If you want to dualboot and want the most out of your harddrive I suggest
1 windows partition (around 10 GB - only programs, no data)
1 linux installation (with more than one partition - around 10 gb without data too)
the rest in one big ext3 partition which holds the data for both windows and linux, for that you need to use ext2ifs to mount that partition on windows.
That way you have no problem using almost all of your harddrive on both systems and can even share thunderbird and firefox settings in both osses without redundancy in data.

:eek: thats a pretty good idea :banana:

[seablade]

Yea I have been thinking about installing the ext drivers on my mac and my wifes MS machine for my external drive, havent done it yet, but worth looking into at least;)

Seablade

[siriusly]

would the 10 gig partition for xp be able to run cs source fine?

yea i know its real newb question but i just want to make sure everything may work b4 i start doin anything

[abf]

hdd size will not (significantly) effect performance. so assume you're getting about 50fps with your settings now, you will still be getting 50fps after you partition. so in a word: YES

now if you fit or not is another story. My windows partition is roughly 16gb (on a 60gb drive) and I can't have more than 2 (usually 1) game installed at a time, or I find my self running out of space very quickly. At one point i had CS:S and Enemy Territory installed at the same time, CS:S went because i only had something like 500mb of empty space to work with. Now i am almost done with ET, so i'll remove that and put CS:S or maybe even NFS:Most Wanted instead, take it one game at a time.

[Delvien]

.

Instead of Emifreq I use powernowd, another speedstep daemon, but as I said, runtimes are compared at same states, idle, 800mhz fsb, 0.7v corevoltage, same lightsetting, same lansetting.
And it's the calced time and the powerconsumption reported by the system that differ in 5-8% which leads to me still using windows.


Emifreq allows you to manually control your cpu speed ( and it can be run WITH powernowd) i always have mine on powersaving when running on batteries.


As for undervolting, is there a WIKI or a guide i can safely follow :P ?

[drizek]

As i posted in another thread, dapper(the next ubuntu release, currently in testing) now supports the sd card reader. its the only distro i know of that does(im sure they all will in the next few months) so that is a plus. dapper is now in a feature freeze and all they are doing now is fixing bugs. it has been really stable for me for the past several weeks so if you want KDE(or gnome) and your sd card to work just install the k/ubuntu dapper flight 3 cd and make sure to upgrade to the latest packages. You will basically have a fully working system. Any problems you may have will most likely be minor and will probably be fixed in the final dapper release.

That said, dapper still is a testing release so if it fubars your computer, dont come hunting me down ;)

[egalus]

Emifreq allows you to manually control your cpu speed ( and it can be run WITH powernowd) i always have mine on powersaving when running on batteries.


As for undervolting, is there a WIKI or a guide i can safely follow :P ?

As you can't clock the P-M with 533 FSB below 800 Mhz I don't see why two speedstep daeomons, powernowd and emifreq would help when comparing only powerconsumption in idle at 800 MHz.

As for undervolting P-M on linux I suggest this page:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Undervolt_a_Pentium_M_CPU
Best prework is to find stable undervoltages for the various speedsetting with nhc on windows.

[seablade]

Hmm when is dapper getting released? Gonna be putting that one on my powerbook.

Seablade

[abf]

Hmm when is dapper getting released? Gonna be putting that one on my powerbook.

Seablade

its in the name, Daper 6.04

thus, sometime in April of 2006.


Ubuntu has 6 months release cycles.

started with Warty Warthog 4.10 (sept 2004)
then Hoary Hatchhog 5.04 (april 2005)
currently Breezy Badger 5.10 (sept 2005)
next Daper Drake 6.04 (april 2006)

[seablade]

I was wondering how they were doing the versioning numbers...

Seablade

[Delvien]

As you can't clock the P-M with 533 FSB below 800 Mhz I don't see why two speedstep daeomons, powernowd and emifreq would help when comparing only powerconsumption in idle at 800 MHz.

As for undervolting P-M on linux I suggest this page:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Undervolt_a_Pentium_M_CPU
Best prework is to find stable undervoltages for the various speedsetting with nhc on windows.

no no no .. you can manually put the cpu freq down to 800 no matter what the load is. so that if your running on battery power and running high power apps, it wont drain your battery with the max freq for the CPU.


And i have tried patching the kernel , (and have just tried again.) But the patch is not "compatible" with my kernel, but im not experienced enough to edit it so it fits in my kernel.

[egalus]

no no no .. you can manually put the cpu freq down to 800 no matter what the load is. so that if your running on battery power and running high power apps, it wont drain your battery with the max freq for the CPU.

You can do this with powernowd too.
Set "-u 100" and it can't change to higher speeds anymore.

But still, using another speedstep daemon won't change anything when comparing powerusage on idle and 800MHz and that's still the part that is interesting, cause linux uses more "basepower" than windows on my i6k, which leads to shorter runtimes.
It's like linux is running with brightness 2 notches higher than windows all the time, but without the effect of more light.


And i have tried patching the kernel , (and have just tried again.) But the patch is not "compatible" with my kernel, but im not experienced enough to edit it so it fits in my kernel.
Which kernel are you using? With 2.6.15 it definately works.

[Delvien]

Which kernel are you using? With 2.6.15 it definately works.


2.6.15-15-i386, can you write a howto for me ? :) hehe

[egalus]

I used a vanilla 2.6.15 - the i386 is compiled for 386 cpus, but you have a much more powerful cpu, why waste computing power for downward compatibility to such an old cpu? Do you plan taking the hdd out of your laptop and putting it into a 386? ;)

The link to the gentoo-wiki for undervolting p-ms is already a howto that works perfectly on vanilla 2.6.15 kernels (nothing else was available on dapper or breezy when I installed the lappy) and is complete in almost every way I can think of.
Do the patch like explained there and make your own kernel. If you send me a pm with your emailadress I can send you my kernel-config so you don't need to find out everything useful yourself (you just have to change from build in graphics to ati). Of course I do not take any responsibility if this config does not work for you ;) (but at it is already the 14th version of my 2.6.15 kernelconfig I guess it's already quite good).

If you have problems following the wiki I suggest you write down what you did and what does not work after that.

[Delvien]

what do i put in when it asks me "File to patch" ?

[Whiplash]

Thanks for the informative thread... in particular, member "abf". I came to this forum specifically to look into putting Linux on my Dell Inspiron 6000. I'm currently dual-booting SuSE 10 & XP on my desktop, but was looking into putting Linux only on the laptop. I have used Ubuntu & Edubuntu (for the kiddie), so getting through the install on the laptop shouldn't be too difficult. I was wondering what unique issues I would have putting Linux on a lappie vice desktop. I think I'm armed enough now to give it a shot.

Thanks Again!

[bigtrouble77]

Thanks for the informative thread... in particular, member "abf". I came to this forum specifically to look into putting Linux on my Dell Inspiron 6000. I'm currently dual-booting SuSE 10 & XP on my desktop, but was looking into putting Linux only on the laptop. I have used Ubuntu & Edubuntu (for the kiddie), so getting through the install on the laptop shouldn't be too difficult. I was wondering what unique issues I would have putting Linux on a lappie vice desktop. I think I'm armed enough now to give it a shot.

Thanks Again!

Stuff kinda unique to laptops:
1. wifi
2. bluetooth
3. (built-in) flash card readers
4. webcams
5. pcmcia devices
6. (crappy) integrated audio

That's about it. If you can get those devices working then you're golden.

[abf]

Stuff kinda unique to laptops:
1. wifi
2. bluetooth
3. (built-in) flash card readers
4. webcams
5. pcmcia devices
6. (crappy) integrated audio

That's about it. If you can get those devices working then you're golden.



1. intel and atheros cards have native support. even native broadcom drivers are in very early stages of developement. for everything esle, there is ndiswrapper (i personally hate it, its very unstable, at least under ubuntu)

2. BT - have no linux + BT experience. sorry.
3. these hardly, if ever work. but i heard Daper is a step forward. haven't had a chance to try it yet, but its ok. hardly ever use this feature anyway
4. webcams. most usb cams work great. very few lappys have built-in cams
5. crappy audio is mostly supported by alsa and the latest kernel, so you should be solid.

[bigtrouble77]

3. these hardly, if ever work. but i heard Daper is a step forward. haven't had
I still can't believe it, but my 9750's multi-card reader is fully supported in breezy. Sadly, my webcam isn't detected.

[Delvien]

Bluetooth in Linux is out of the box functionality. For all things that HAVE to run in windows look into VMware.

[abf]

why VMWARE?

I think Wine and XOffice have made great strides forward in the last year or so. We also have seen Qemu and comercially available Win4Lin come, both of which give you some degree of functionality.

Wine - Wine is not an emulator. Its a "compatibility layer" for windows progs
XOffice - commercial program based on Wine to run MS Office and P.Shop
Win4Lin - lets you install a full copy of XP over Linux
Qemu - open source virtual machine emulator. Much like VMWare
VMWare - commercial virtual machine emulator. people say faster than qemu

[Delvien]

Qemu is slow, clunky and doesnt have the support vmware does. I can do anything in VMware i can do in root windows partition booted up. hell i use Adobe photoshop 9 cs2 in it under linux,

As for Win4Lin its just plain slow. The support is there but not the speed.


SS of me running Adobe PS 9 cs2

http://ubuntuforums.org/gallery/showimage.php?i=1898&original=1&c=2

[seablade]

Qemu w/ the accelerator is supposed to be decent, though I have not tried it.

Wine is no substitute for a windows VM or partition in some instance ABF, you should know that by now. That being said, I dont use Windows at all myself, only my wife does;) Course when I go back into drafting, next year probably, I will probably be setting up a VM or partition of some sort with AutoCad on it.

Seablade

[Delvien]

You better have alot of memory for autocad in vmware: )

[seablade]

I Do Audio work on my desktop;) Memory aint likely to be a problem on that.

Seablade

[Delvien]

Must be nice :P Make sure you edit the prefs for Vmware to have more memory , i think the default is like 192mb


im going to try to install my copy of Autocad 2005 on vmware and pre-test it for you, but not today :P.

[seablade]

Heh no real rush. I dont do drafting much anymore, I plan on taking an advanced scene design course that I will be doing my drafting in Cad(The teacher is really big on hand drafting, and good at it, but I prefer computer). Havent done any drafting for scenic in a while though so I am a bit rusty. Itll be interesting.

At least itll be better than running Cad on Virtual PC or something evil like that on the Mac OS;)

Seablade

[abf]

i actually DONT have wine or win4lin or anything installed on my linux, its just pure linux. period.

however i do have a windows partition, and the only reason i keep that is to:
1 - frag
2 - sync pda
3 - use mmc card reader

[bigtrouble77]

i actually DONT have wine or win4lin or anything installed on my linux, its just pure linux. period.

however i do have a windows partition, and the only reason i keep that is to:
1 - frag
2 - sync pda
3 - use mmc card reader
I need to keep vmware around for my treo650. I can sync with evolution, but I can't install programs.

My hope is that google starts releasing linux pc's and actually causes some game developers to ship linux installers.

[egalus]

what do i put in when it asks me "File to patch" ?

Soundy like you don't use patch with the right parameters or in the right directory.
"man patch" might help, or trying
patch -p1
or
patch -p0