Hi, you are lucky to have one of the most linux-friendly laptops at all! I have an Inspiron 8000 as well, and absolutely everything works including XFree86-4 (with Gnome 1.4 and KDE2), sound, high-resolution console with VESA framebuffer (and working SVGAlib apps incl. zgv!), usb, firewire, pcmcia, irda, microphone, internal cd-burner (with SCSI-emulation), touchpad AND trackstick, all special keys etc. It is really sweet and worth the effort!
I also have a MiniPCI Ethernet/Modem CombiCard. The Ethernet part worked out of the box, and the WinModem runs with the ltmodem linux driver for winmodems with Lucent chip. But watch out: Dell ships two different models of such cards without telling you which one you get: I have the Actiontec card and it works; but if you should have the 3Com card you will not get the internal modem working. I run Debian unstable with Kernel 2.4.3 and XFree86-4.0.2. Sound works with the experimental OSS driver in Kernel 2.4.x. All data partitions are running with ReiserFS, the bootloader is GRUB, and the printer server is CUPS. Of course you have to compile a custom kernel to get all hardware supported. If you compile a kernel with hotplug and pcmcia support you will get a kernel panic during booting! To avoid this you have to build your own pcmcia-cs packages from the Debian sources, with the Configure-option --pnp. To get SVGAlib working you have to recompile the SVGAlib packages with the setting MAX_REGS on 15000 in driver.h. If you should not know how to do all this, I could send you all these binary packages as email attachments. I can also send you any conffiles you may need (e.g. for XFree, SVGAlib, kernel configuration, GRUB, etc.). Just let me know what you need. Of course you should be able yourself to install a very basic Debian system from the Potato CDs and/or web (via external modem), at least in console mode (without complete hardware support). Cheers, Guenter -- Linux: Who needs GATES in a world without fences?
