Hi,
I Have a M17x-R2 running Gentoo almost perfectly (still ironing out a few bugs).
My Hardware in brief: Intel i7, ATI 4850 x2 (SLI, or X-fire as ATI call it), 2HDD's (Set to Raid-0) DELL mini BT and the Broadcom STA.
First off i'll mention the few bugs i have yet to fix.
1. Bluetooth is a bit flakey, for some reason somtimes it's on others it's not although i's seen by the system and mapped to hci0 bu the MAC addr is all 0's, sure this isn't to hard to fix, is prob somthig to do with activating/de-activating in windows, or somthing like that.
2. The Graphics chips run warm with both the fglrx driver and the kernel radeon driver (i'm using the kernel one for kms, it's better the the fglrx IMO). the problem with these running warm is the noise from the fans, i'm not saying there on full speed but when there not under any load i don't think they clock down as low as in windows, although i do have hopes for 2.6.35-rc4 the pm on the radeon have been reworked im using 2.6.35-rc3 (with linux next patches) and there is noticeable improvement.
3. Battery Levels are normally incorrect depending on weather the batt is enabled or not (and this can't be done in linux as far as i know still looking into it)
4. No Stelth mode means both Graphic cards are always on
5. Lastly and most annoying is the Braodcom Driver for linux is really really really poor. it suffers from a fair few issues. I will cover that in a min.
Although i just mentioned i'm using 2.6.35-rc3 so far the only advantage over the one from the the emerge branch that i can see it the better clock speeds on the radeon driver and a big disadvantage is lots off patching needs to be done where as the gentoo kernel has this patches already.
My Software in Brief: Windows 7 & Gentoo emerged with the ~amd64 on a ext4 filesystem
My biggest issue by far was the raid set up took me almost a week to work out that when windows 7 installs it creates 2 partitions one to boot it and one for the OS, the problem here is it feels the need to overlap the partitions by 1 sector resulting in a corrupt partition table, this makes installing grub a real nightmare (btw this isn't limited to gentoo i tried a few distros and all but unbntu 10.04 suffered from this issue). And to make matters worse windows 7 will not boot if it is not partitioned in this way, my fix for this was to split the drives into 2 raid drives (WARNING this till distroy ALL data on the drives) the other options will be to boot from a external pendrive or try and get grub to reconize the partition table.
The install process was easy enough from the live CD following the instructions on the Gentoo wiki when you boot from the Live CD use "gentoo dodmraid" this will allow you to access the raid disk and not just detect the 2 HDD's. also rember to emerge dmraid
Partitions:
512MB /boot
the rest EXT3/EXT4 your choice
Kernel config:
make sure you compile into your kernel
Raid-1/0
Device-mapper
Ext2/Ext3/Ext4
if you wanna use kms de-select all fb devices, and compile radeon with kms, fb console and fb decorator in as well
as for modules you'll also need to select
one of the intel wireless drivers (this selects CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT need to buld the Broadcom module later)
coretemp (for temperature sensors)
Any other modules select as needed
Grub:
Install as per the instructions found here
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/RAID/NVRAID_with_dmraid then "Easy Solution (using genkernel)" and follow the steps for the custom kernel bit. as a side note I tried both grub and grub2 and my advice is stick with legacy grub.
Sound:
add "option snd-hda-intel model=alienware" (this uses the fix in alsa for the 3 hp jacks) to "/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf"
"update-modules"
Kernel Command line:
Replace all "X's" as needed"
"Root (hdX,X)
"kernel=/boot/kernel-2.6.XX-gentoo-rcX root=/dev/ram0 real_root=/dev/mapper/isw_XXXXXX_VolumeXX dodmraid"
"initrd=/boot/(initrd created above)"
also you may want to add "radeon.modeset=1" for kms and "fbcon=set:1" this is for SLI if you use it if you get a black screen on boot or a burning effect on the screen
AlienFx:
Google "AlienFX lite"
Wi-Fi:
"emerge -av broadcom-sta" if this works 1st time... great! if not see my trouble shooting below.
TXpower it a know issue ins some cases for it to be set to off, even if it's not i find setting it to 24 is a magic number for me.
"iwconfig <device> txpower 24"
Power saving turning off may fix constant dropping connection.
"iwconfig <device> power off"
if all that fails i found unloading the "lib80211_crypt_tkip" module helps alot this module is loaded by the broadcom driver so it can't be blacklisted and is need to build the driver so it can't be deselected
"modprobe -r lib80211_crypt_tkip"
this should leave "lib80211" and "wl"
I still have a few things on my "TODO: list" but appart from Wi-Fi it pretty much there.
I hope this helps you and others in setting up/deciding to set up Gentoo on your Alienware M17x/M15x.
i had lots of fun getting this to work (almost) correctly on my M17x as far as i know the M15x is almost the same hardware.
if you have any feedback on this guide or if you have a issue i haven't mentioned above let me know.
Okiura,
Edit: As a side i have tried a fair few distros in my search for the perfect one for this machine, and i'd say Gentoo is the best by far. as mentioned above some elbow greese is needed to set this up but it is worth it in the end, there are other distros out there that are easier to set up but that is because they are all generic and do not use the system to is full potentialm, and to get them to run nearly as smooth takes just as much elbow greese but as the apps are not compiled by you machine for you machine they still lack that little somthing
)
I guess this is the dilemma you run into when wanting to have a laptop for your only pc, but needing it to have some power to do more than surfing the net.
