Dell Inspiron 8600

jm2178 · n00b Joined: 18 Dec 2003 Posts: 5

My old laptop died last week (kids, dont mess around on the inside while it is running) and I have a dell inspiron 8600 notebook on its way to me in the next couple of days.

I've already lost over a week of work, and simply don't have 2 weeks to spend getting gentoo up and running....so i'm going to stick with WinXP, unless maybe one of you can help me out?

Is there anyone out there who has gentoo and KDE or Gnome up and running on their 8600? Is it possible that you made, or could make a backup image with Ghost, or something like that and allow me to use it? I know this is a total shot in the dark, and for some reason i expect flames from some seriously uptight DIY guy, but what the hell, most of you seem exceptionally cool so i thought i'd ask.

olav · Apprentice Joined: 24 Aug 2003 Posts: 194 Location: Norway

The only thing you really need is a working kernel config file and a ditto XF86Config. Surely there must be someone who can provide that (not me, unfortunately. I have a latitude C840).

rustedcage · n00b Joined: 23 Dec 2003 Posts: 4 Location: USA

If you send me your email, I can send you my xf86config and my kernel config.
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hrm...

gurke · Apprentice Joined: 10 Jul 2003 Posts: 260

also got one here :wink:

its pretty easy, and you can get it up in a day if you use the grp isos. the only things that are tricky is display and ndiswrapper. but there are pretty good howtos on tuxmobil.

Jon Beilin · Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2003 12:49 am Post subject:

hey there. it's not much trouble at all. gentoo linux was my first non-automated setup that i've installed on my 8600 (tried mandrake and slack previously) and it didn't stress me much (or take all that much time since the pm is pretty speedy as is the 7.2k rpm hitachi HD). Anyhow, this site has a lot of info on getting the 8600 going with linux, including some 2.6 info.

sms · Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2003 7:37 am Post subject:

Got one here too, since about 1 month. Installing it was no problem; but haven't yet been able to test wlan and firewire support (don't have wlan on the router yet or any firewire devices to test).

One thing to watch out: I only got X to work with nVidia-driver 4363. As I have a 2.6 kernel I had to modify an ebuild to work with the 2.6-patch from minion.de. The modification is trivial, but I can mail you the instructions or the needed files themselves...

Or did anybody get their X on an Inspiron 8600 to work with a newer nvidia-driver?

Well, this gem is great for 3d gaming, just have been playing Neverwinter Nights on the other X-Server running on the laptop

Hope this helps

sms

gurke · Apprentice Joined: 10 Jul 2003 Posts: 260

it definitly works with the 4620 NVIDIA driver, i will test out the newer one too.