Saturday, April 02, 2005

Gentoo 2005.0 on my Dell Latitude D600

If this image is missing; Dell might have reorganized their site.

My cool purple Gentoo 2005.0 CDs came this week. I've been putting it off before because of spotty hardware support, but I'm ready with this release to try Gentoo Linux on my Dell Latitude D600. Happily, there are plenty of resources out there for me to use.

As I progress, I'll update this posting.


From the factory my Dell laptop was setup to boot from the hard drive, not the CD. So use F2 immediately at boot to change that in the BIOS. Thank you, Dell.


First thing I found, the hardware detection on the live CD is great! However, it does not run DHCP on my Intel Pro 2200BG wireless card. The ipw2200 kernel module loads, but DHCP will not set up networking. There was noise about firmware needed, but I do not want to go there. Would it trash my XP partition from networking?


Yah! The live CD includes /usr/bin/ntfsresize so I can avoid the expensive, commercial alternative — besides, their pages loads too slowly. Now I just have to figure out how to shrink my Windows XP installation so I have so disk space for Gentoo.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another couple of alternatives if you have to resize NTFS:
- Do the Mandrake install until the resize is done. Then stop the install and reinstall your favorite distro.
- Boot with Knoppix and use it's nice graphical NTFS resize stuff.

Anonymous said...

I have wireless network card using ipw2100 driver.

Because Intel can't release the card specifications to the public it uses binary part of the drivers.

So the firmware is run on your CPU and not in your network card.