Gentoo Linux on Inspiron 6000

I’ve recently got myself a Dell Inspiron 6000, after my Compaq Presario 1580 refused to boot. A quick post mortem to the Compaq reveals that the cause of death of the laptop was the broken motherboard, making it not really practical to have it repaired (that is to replace the motherboard) in the economics point of view.

The new Dell Inspiron 6000 is a Centrino system with 1.86 GHz Pentium M and comes comes with some decent hardware. The first thing to do when I get the laptop was to format and repartition it to make space for my Linux installation. Windows was left with 5 GB, and the remaining space, out of the 80 GB drive goes to Linux.

I’ve been using few Linux distributions so far, and now I mainly use Gentoo Linux. By the time I was to install Gentoo Linux on the Inspiron, Stage 1 was no longer supported and so I just proceed with Stage 3. After almost a day, I managed to get my KDE + Firefox running, installing it using my favorite live cd, SLAX. Running lspci produced the following output:

herugrim ~ # lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3)
0000:00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Radeon Mobility M300]
0000:03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
0000:03:01.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b3)
0000:03:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 08)
0000:03:01.2 Class 0805: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 17)
0000:03:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG MiniPCI Adapter (rev 05)

Everything seems to be working fine, but I later realized that there were few things missing:

1. The provided radeon graphics driver doesn’t support DRI for the card
2. Intel wireless card is not natively supported by the kernel
3. Ethernet doesn’t start automaticly
4. Couldn’t turn on DMA for the dvdrw drive
5. Software suspend doesn’t just work using the default method prescribed in gentoo wiki

With the workload at the office, it took me quite sometime to find the solutions. In my next posts I’ll show how did I actually addressed all the issues.