Getting Gentoo 1.4rc2 Tuned on an Inspiron 2650

Cheesefoam · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Jan 2003 Posts: 89

Just a little background here: This post is more informational to help people who may have had similar problems or not. If it is repetitive of other information elsewhere, I apologize - just trying to summarize what I did to get this laptop running slick and fast.

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 2650 w/ 384 MB RAM, NVidia Geforce 2 Go, Toshiba DVD-ROM, and I am using a Cisco Aironet 350 series PCMCIA wireless NIC.

First, I couldn't get the boot CD to boot without adding in the "nonet" and "noscsi" options - I just used the onboard NIC instead of the wireless and went from there for install. I had tried the vanilla and gentoo-2.4.19 based sources, but neither enabled DMA on my hard drive, so I went with the lolo-2.4.20-r1 sources instead. Worked like a charm, but ALSA was more than argumentative under KDE 3.0 and 3.1rc6 - noatun and xmms would pop and erratically garble sound periodically, and I spent a lot of time adjusting the buffer size under the control center to get good response.

I read about the effectiveness of adjusting the jiffies in the kernel configuration, but since the lolo-sources currently don't support it, I tried the ck-sources. These fail to compile when I enable the Aironet modules (bug has been reported), due to issues most likely going back to the built in ALSA drivers in that kernel (reverse-patching the ALSA kernel patch fixes the problem). So, I downloaded the variable HZ patch from Con Kolivas's kernel patch page and applied that to the lolo-sources.

Worked like a charm (this has been reported as a enhancement request to the lolo-sources kernel) - although I have had to adjust the buffer size in the ARTS sound control panel to 23 ms, noatun and xmms do just fine now with sound - only very rarely is there any popping, and no garbling of the sound at all. KDE 3.1rc6 is VERY responsive, and I must say that I am extremely impressed with Gentoo's speed and reliability.

FYI: I compiled with "-march=pentium4 -O2 -mmmx -msse -msse2 -fPIC", then prelinked all binaries after compilation. Prelink gave me fits trying to compile, since it would bail on the layout2 test, until I found that it doesn't like libelf - you need to have elfutils installed instead (bug reported, too.)

Anyways, with all that said and done, I hope this helps someone out there setting up their machine.

koala · Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2003 10:21 pm Post subject:

I also have an i2650. The OSS sound modules work so much better for me than ALSA. I would suggest you to check out the linux-dell-laptops list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux-dell-laptops/

You can post there your experiences.

BTW: in a little while, gkrellm will get a new version 2.1.6, that will support ACPI battery readouts on the broken i2650 bios

Cheesefoam · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Jan 2003 Posts: 89

I would love some sort of monitor for the Dell's b0rked bios functions. The laptop itself is great, but Dell really messed up badly in their bios implementation... go figure.

As for OSS, that's interesting. My few furtive attempts to get OSS working met with a tremendous amount of hissing and crackling in the sound stream - perhaps I just didn't put enough effort into it. Mind you, I will - especially if it works better than ALSA, since I still can squeeze one bit of sound out of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Thanks for the suggestions, though - and I'll look into the linux-dell-laptops list.

koala · Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2003 9:32 pm Post subject:

I guess the RTCW Wolfenstein are mmap problems. Maybe you can get it to work through artsdsp, which has an option to enable mmap.

Cheesefoam · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Jan 2003 Posts: 89

Tried it - no go. Also tried via aoss... didn't work either. I'm not too terribly concerned about games on my laptop anyways - that's what my home machine is for, but it would be nice, just for the sake of being able to. :mrgreen:

I'm toying around a bit with the OSS drivers, but not having results better than that from ALSA.

masterluc · Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2003 11:17 pm Post subject:

Cheesefoam, thank you very much for the advice about prelink and libelf, this helped me installing prelink!

koala · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2003 1:27 pm Post subject:

Just an update, the latest gkrellm version can be made to work with the i2650 acpi support:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux-dell-laptops/message/17966