Linux and XFree86 on Dell Inspiron 2600

Main content: 2002-09-20

Comment added 2003-02-03:
A More recent Inspiron 2600 install using Red Hat has been done by Jonathan Lee, you may read his information here.

Comment added 2003-02-28:
I've gotten a couple of e-mails with helpful tips regarding Linux and the Inspiron 2600, so I am posting them here for others to know, I have not tried them myself (yet), as my system is working as I set it up to begin with and I have a busy schedule and can't afford downtime right now :)
Jonathan Lee (Canada) notified me that the direct rendering issue is more likely a kernel problem rather than X, the built in support for DRI/DRM with i830 (i830.o as module) in kernel 2.4.20 is broken or buggy/flawed, even 2.4.21-pre4-ac4 is not fixed. You can build this module from the Xfree86 4.2.0 sources, something like:

  cd /usr/src/XFree86-4.2.0/xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/os-support/linux/drm/kernel
  make -f Makefile.linux

Nils Valentin (Japan) notified me that there is a new BIOS release, A07, available that solves the 1MB video-ram limitation. You can download this file from the BIOS area at Dell's FTP server.

This is not a complete set of instructions of how to do it, this is how I did it on my newly bought laptop (notebook) with a base installation of Debian Woody. This information will most likely be obsolete by the time XFree86 version 4.2.2 or newer has been released.

I am not a "good linux hacker", and especially when it comes to the X window system I am a newbie, so some of the things I did may be quite foolish. Since I am using Debian Stable, I don't like to be creating stuff on my own that makes package usage difficult, I even tried the X-dev stuff from http://people.debian.org/~branden/ as of Sept. 7 (4.2.1, I386), but using that package source (apt) corrupted other things on my system, probably because I use woody and not sid and had to hack in sid's glibc6 and other things. I have the 15" LCD version, I don't know if that would make any difference compared to the 14". This approach will overcome the video card legacy memory size and allow you 1024x768 in 24bit colors.

Here is what I did to my system today to make this work, it came with Bill Gates XP amateur (home) edition installed on a fulldisk (18) GB partition.

2002-09-20 (Well, I started yesterday but completed that today):

Repartitioned like this:

 Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2432 cylinders
       Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
       /dev/hda1 1 4 32098+ de Dell Utility
       /dev/hda2 * 5 16 96390 83 Linux
       /dev/hda3 17 989 7815622+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
       /dev/hda4 990 2432 11590897+ 5 Extended
       /dev/hda5 990 1962 7815591 83 Linux
       /dev/hda6 1963 2023 489951 82 Linux swap
       /dev/hda7 2024 2145 979933+ 83 Linux
       /dev/hda8 2146 2432 2305296 b Win95 FAT32

The first 32MB partition was already there, not sure what its for, Dell/System stuff probably used when going standby or hibernating or something like that. hda2 is a 100MB ext2/ext3 for /boot. hda3 is 8GB NTFS for Wintendo. hda5 is 8GB /, hda6 is 450MB swap (system has 256MB), hda7 is 1G for /home and hda8 is 2GB (the rest) for a shared FAT win/lin partition.

Installed Bill Gates XP and the 324 patches issued to date...
Installed Debian from Woody/3.0 CD. At boot prompt i had to use the no framebuffer option which you can find in one of the helpscreens, start with: linux video=vga16:off ,otherwise you'll get a flickering screen.
That will boot the 2.2. kernel, I tried to use the v2.4 kernel but for some reason that per compiled kernel is not compatible at all..
Installed only basics, didn't even start dselect (I just find this quicker, running upgrade later on anyway).
Changet /etc/apt/sources_list and did a update/upgrade to get all the latest changes.
Used dselect and apt-get to install som dev packages, x-applications and other things, probably a whole bunch of stuff that is not applicable to getting X running on this machine. Here is my get_selections from dpkg.
At some point I also had X4.1 installed but I couldn't get it to work, but this probably left a bunch of configuration files on my system that I used later.
Now I started looking at the information from http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/linux/c400.html which I found thru the software/linux user forum at Dell support pages.
Download Kernel 2.4.19 and compile, make sure you include AGP, AGPGART, i810 video, i810/ac97 sound and 3c95x ethernet. I also included console video mode selection support. Install and boot on this kernel, I use vga=1 or vga=ext and that works (mode 6 does not work).
Got the binary version of XFree86 4.2.0 (I know that I could have built the whole thing from scratch, which I had to anyway beacuse of the updated i830 driver, BUT, doing make install failed for me with missing files in its own build tree, so I just used the binaries). Get the binaries from ftp://ftp.xfree86.com/pub/XFree86/4.2.0/binaries/Linux-ix86-glibc22/ or another mirror, make sure your read the readme and install instruction and install as normal!
Download the binaries for upgrade to 4.2.1 from ftp://ftp.xfree86.com/pub/XFree86/4.2.1/binaries/Linux-ix86-glibc22/ and install these as normal.
Download the sources so that we can make the patched driver, got those from ftp://ftp.xfree86.com/pub/XFree86/4.2.0/source/ and I did not get the 4.2.1 patch for these, not sure if that is good or bad in regards to this new i830 driver, but it worked for me.
Extract the sources to e.g. /usr/src/
Download the i830 patch from http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/linux/i830_driver-1mb-stolen-hack.patch to the same directory.
As the ref. doc. says:
patch -p0 <i830_driver-1mb-stolen-hack.patc
cd xc
echo "#define BuildServersOnly YES" >>config/cf/host.def
make World WORLDOPTS=
And it's gon'a take a while.
Copy the new driver to its correct location
cp exports/lib/modules/drivers/i810_drv.o /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers
I had to edit /usr/bin/x11/startx since it was pointing the the X default locations at /usr/X11R6 instead of debians /etc/X11 for the config files, so I changed two lines from
sysclientrc=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc
ysserverrc=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xserverrc
to
sysclientrc=/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
sysserverrc=/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
but this may vary on your system I believe, if you didn't have X installed before.
Then I changed /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to this

And that was it, it work for me.. DRI (Direct Rendering) does not work, so trying to start Tuxracer gives really slow going game. According to some information at http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/845driver.html there has been some changes done to XFree86 that will implement a better solution than this patch I used here and also include direct rendering, I will probably try that sometime soon, or maybe just wait until 4.2.2 is released.

Another couple of things worth mentioning is that the soundcard works fine with the i810/ac97 driver, and the network card works with the 3c59x driver. 3com has released source for a specific 3c9xx driver, I didn't even bother trying it.

Good Luck :)

PS! Instead of asking me about some X-specifics and such, you will probably have better luck at one of the newsgroups, as I am only the guy that "got it to work" wihout really understanding it all.

Jon Thomas "Stoker" Stokkeland

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