Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 11:12:20 -0500 From: Andrew Heybey <ath@bellcore.com> To: Jerry Dunham <jdunham@fc.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Will it work on a Dell latitude XPI-CD? Message-ID: <199701301612.LAA03713@grapenuts.bellcore.com> In-Reply-To: Jerry Dunham's message of Wed, 29 Jan 1997 22:17:13 -0600 (CST) References: <199701300417.WAA21257@freeside.fc.net>
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jdunham> I am interested in hearing of any other success or lack jdunham> thereof with Dell notebooks and FreeBSD. I have 2.2-960801-SNAP running on a Lattitude XPi-P100SD. Works great with a couple of minor problems. I managed to get the PC-Card support mostly working (the out-of-the box support, I didn't get PAO). The laptop came with a Dell (really 3com) ethernet and Dell (really Megahertz) modem. I can't plug them both in at the same time. For example, pccardd reports "driver allocation failed for Megahertz" if I plug in the modem while the ethernet is installed. I haven't investigated why to any great extent since I generally don't need them both at the same time. It could very well be an operator configuration error. I can't suspend the thing with a PC-Card installed. Guaranteed lockup. This fact is documented, so I wasn't surprised. This machine has an 800x600 display, but it is using the Neomagic display chip which XFree86 does not support. The result is that I can run X only with the VGA16 driver (giving 4 bit planes). In addition, XFree86 doesn't know how to get the chip to 800x600 mode. I had to change the boot code to make a BIOS call to change to 800x600 mode. Since the console code doesn't understand 800x600 mode, I then don't have a console. I pretend it's a security feature--if someone wants to boot it single-user he or she will have to type blind because the console won't work. I tried the XInside X server demo and it worked fine with 8 planes (modulo a bug in the acceleration code that left occasional small bits of garbage on the screen) and also properly switched modes so that the console worked. I will probably buy the XInside server. In sum I don't know if I would buy one to run FreeBSD, but since I did not have a choice as to which machine I got (Bellcore bought it, not me) I was delighted to be able to run a real OS. Now if only people would stop sending me these strange .DOC files so I could stop booting windoze... [Seriously, has anyone seen a program that runs under FreeBSD to view microsloth word files?] andrew
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