[NBLUG/talk] Re: [NBLUG/Announce] InstallFest; May 14th

[Tim C. Lewis]

On Thu, 5 May 2005, LynnSears wrote:
> Thanks for answering,  I have what dell calls a RADEON X300 series.  I have 
> been poking about on the web and see that people are having trouble with the 
> Dell 8400 series and linux installs and it sounds abit complicated to me.I 
> was trying to get a dual boot going with xp and suse 9.3 or some other newer 
> linux distro.  I bought this machine recently new in box off ebay. It seems 
> to work just fine. 3GHz  P4 600 series, 512mb, sata 80g hd with the video 
> card in a pci e x16 slot. It has a cd rom and a cd-r/rw both samsung. The 
> network adapter is a Broadcom netXtreme 57xx gigabit which I think is 
> supported by linux and usb controller is Intel 82801.  I list all this stuff 
> in the hopes that someone might be able to tell me whether a trip to the 
> upcoming install fest might result in a dual boot dell. I surely would like 
> to try and make it happen.  thanks...Lynn

a friend of mine has a dell 8600 laptop and i got dual boot xp + gentoo 
(2004.3, but 2005.1 should be fine) linux working on it like a champ.  i 
used xorg, not xfree, with dri/drm.  i think her dell has an nvidia in it, 
however.

the laptop i'm using right now has an ati radeon mobility 7500 and it also 
works great with a similar gentoo/xp setup.

a quick google search brings up a couple x300 series issues, but also 
workarounds.

i'm uncertain on the current out-of-the-box X setups for suse or fedora, 
and gentoo isn't really something that you'd want to do at an installfest 
most likely (it can take some time).  i believe suse encourages use of 
the fglrx driver, which says it supports radeon x300 cards.  check out the 
README/rpms at:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/X/ATI/suse93/i386/fglrx/8.12.10/

i would suspect that installfest people could help you getting a dual boot 
going on that, altho i'm not sure if i'll be there myself.

-tcl.