Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 11:02:39 -0700 From: Denver Maddux <denver@nitrous.net> To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Dell C800 experience Message-ID: <20001219110232.K7556@nitrous.net>
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Hi guys. I was recently given the ownership of a new Dell Latitude C800... the newest in their line of Latitudes. It's a pretty schwanky looking piece of mobile hardware, with a big screen, nice design, and seemingly good components: PIII 850MHz 32GB HD 512MB RAM 32MB AGP ATI Mobility-M4 video Maestro 3i sound system 2 USB ports Firewire port 1400x1050 res. capable screen goober AND touchpad mouse on the same keyboard Mini-PCI 3com 556b 56k modem+ 10/100 nic built in CD-RW in side ultra bay floppy in front ultra bay 2 cooling fans on the back and with both batteries in and fully charged you get nearly 12 hours of power). All in all a pretty nice laptop, but pricy. I first tried installing FreeBSD 4.2 on this laptop from the standard boot floppies. Upon boot, the laptop would hang (three fingered salute would reboot the laptop gracefully) as it tried to bring up the PCIC device. Seemingly, this was because the PCIC device wasn't being assigned an IRQ (thought it should have been getting IRQ 10). I dl'd some 4.1.1 floppy images and booted off of those just fine. I changed my install options to grab 4.2 and installed... but the GENERIC kernel would not boot the laptop (same issue as booting from the 4.2 install floppies). Reinstalling 4.1.1 gave me a working system, from which I cvsup'd 4.2-STABLE and did a make world and built a custom kernel. The system is working with a few caveats at this time. 1/ The Mini-PCI devices cannot be enabled in the BIOS. For some reason their being active causes problems for PCMCIA services and cards fail to be recognized and configured. Disabling the Mini-PCI interfaces fixes this. I haven't delved further into this as of yet to find the root cause. 2/ Resume does not work properly on this laptop. For some reason I device at0 timeouts, and right as the system is about to become active again from suspend, it hangs and will not reboot gracefully. 3/ No X support for the video chipset yet. The Mobility-M4 is not as of yet supported by XFree or XIG. I am loaning the laptop to XIG for a while for them to build drivers for this chipset. They are saying that they should be done sometime in January with them. 4/ No sound support... Other than that, the USB ports seem to work fine, shutdown -p works, the dual goober/touchpad mouse thingy seems to work just fine, etc. This is a seriously nice laptop for anyone that is looking for something not so small (or a desktop type replacement). I'll be sans C800 in a couple of days as it gets shipped to XIG, but I can work on this more until then. I'm sure there are holes in my report but I wanted to get this out while it was somewhat fresh in my mind. Any questions, drop them my way. -Denver To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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