Dell 8000 User Manual
Nori’s mini-HOWTO:
Debian Woody on the Dell Inspiron 8000
Nori Heikkinen
August 13, 2003
Rationale
All my previous installs of Debian have been really easy, but then again they’ve
all been on PC desktops. The deal has been:
1. Download the first ISO image onto CD
2. Stick the CD in your drive
3. (Make sure you have the BIOS set to boot off the CD before the hard
drive)
4. Follow instructions, generally hitting ’okay’ for the next half hour
5. Ignore tasksel by and large
6. Ignore most of the dselect list, and only put on what you need later
7. . . . and voil`a, a Debian install!
It was not this easy this time ’round. For whatever reason, this little i8k did
not seem to want Debian on it! From start to finish (or rather, as finished as
it’s going to get, because I need to be doing work), it took a week and a half,
and I ended up scrapping the entire install and beginning from scratch twice.
This document is half for myself, in case I need to do this install over again,
and half for anyone else out there, who has had as much trouble as I have with
the whole process.
Good luck.
Configuration
I was working with the following system:
Dell Inspiron 8000
• PIII, 697 MHz
• 256M RAM
• ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility M4 AGP
• ESS Technology ES1983S Maestro-3i PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 10)
• a Dell Logitech scrolly-wheel infrared mouse, model M-UR69
I was working off a Debian Woody image with the stock kernel 2.2.20-idepci,
downloaded from the Rutgers mirror here:
ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/debian-cd/images/i386/debian-30r1-i386-binary-1.iso
This image had a corrupt library (libpcap0 0.6.2-2 i386.deb), which prevented me from using the CD as my primary installation source (I did a network
install instead). I do not recommend it!
1 Video Issues
I had two large problems with the video card (or, for lack of my understanding
of what that incorporates, let’s say “the graphical elements of the system”).
The first prevented me from even beginning the install in a reasonable manner,
so I’m addressing them first.
1.1 LILO parameters
When I stuck my fresh new Debian CD in my drive and rebooted, a big blue
welcome screen like I am accustomed to did not pop up. Instead, as soon as
the CD started loading its default kernel (2.2.20-idepci), the screen split itself
in four, overlapping its text at the horizontal quarters. To get an idea of what
this was like (if you’re not already staring at it), picture the normal screen,
then copy it, and scoot the second image down so it overlays the first, at the
1-quarter mark. Do the same again at the halfway mark, and the 3-quarter
mark, and you have something that is utterly illegible by the bottom.
As I now understand it, this has something to do with framebuffer support.
But instead of disabling that in the kernel (which you might want to do if you
ever get around to rolling your own, for some really good reason (I’m not a fan
— see why in Section 5!)), you can just pass a couple options to your boot
loader.
Debian uses LILO by default, so at this point, you can just use the following
(I don’t know how to do it in grub, but I’m sure it’s possible):
video=vga16:off
This means that instead of hitting ‘ENTER’ as usual and watching the stock
kernel load, you will need to type:
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linux video=vga16:off
(The kernel image, followed by the boot parameters.)
You can now boot up okay, but you’ll need to be wary of this when you’re
glibly ‘ENTER’ing through menus later in the install — when you’re asked if
you want to append anything to the kernel image for the boot loader, you need
to type that line (video=vga16:off) again. If you don’t, the screen will get
split again.
You can fix a split screen if you already have an installed system by editing
your /etc/lilo.conf. In your linux stanza, just put append="video=vga16:off"
(this is what would have happened if you’d specified it in the base system configuration). Then run lilo — your changes won’t take effect until you do. (This
will also tell you if you’ve screwed it up somehow — it’s good to double-check.)
1.2 Xserver-XFree86 Configuration
Even after I had the base system installed and happy, I couldn’t get X working
as easily as I had in the past (which was basically it coming up upon rebooting
after the base installation). I must have configured something wrong, because
instead of starting X as usual, the screen flashed a couple times, and then kicked
me back to a console.
The way to reconfigure the X-server is by using dpkg (what else?). Do:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
to reconfigure X. It’s best just to change one parameter at a time, so you can
see what’s working and what’s not.
1.2.1 Which Video Card
Even though I had an ATI card, choosing ati in the video card section did not
work — I had to choose r128. Strangely enough, this is not an option during the
base install! I have no idea why this is. So if you’re using the same image, you
will need to reconfigure the X-server no matter what if you need r128 support.
When you reconfigure (as root, of course), choose r128. Then restart X with
a ‘/etc/init.d/xdm restart‘.
Having r128 as your video card might make X come up, but unless you’ve
magically specified everything else correctly (and the important parameters —
at least the ones I had trouble with — are the horizontal and vertical refresh
rates, and the screen size), it may be too small (which I never saw), distorted
(which I saw a lot), or even turn white and freeze the entire computer (which I
also saw a lot).
To prevent having to do a hard reboot (because when X crashes into the
mysterious white screen of death, nothing — not even the three-finger salute
— can send the machine the signals it needs to cleanly shut down), have your
fingers ready over the CTRL+ALT+F1 keys to take you back to your console
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if the display is not perfect — it might not crash if it’s not, but if it does, you
don’t want to have to not only wait for it to check all its inodes (if you haven’t
yet tune2fs’d it to ext3 — see Section 7.1), but perhaps screw up in the process
of so many crashes.
If that’s perfect, great! If not, read on . ..
1.2.2 Horizontal and Vertical Refresh Rates; Screen Size
If it’s not perfect, quickly switch back to the console, and try again. I had to
play with the screen sizes a bit. A friend suggested starting with the lowest
option (640×480) and work up from there, but I found that only the exactly
correct one worked. Maybe this is a good approach for a desktop system, but
not a laptop.
Another friend, however, tell me that “ that’s almost guaranteed to fail on
a laptop, as I understand it. Laptops have LCD screens, which are more finicky
than LED. When going through the dpkg-reconfigure, you need to specify the
screen-size that it is capable of, and tell it that it’s an LCD screen, and it ought
to be able to get the rest.” That seemed to have been more correct in my case.
I wanted a screen at 1600×1200, so I set that for my screen size. The first
time I installed Debian on this machine, that plus the r128 video card did the
trick, and I was set. The second time, however, I also had to play with the
horizontal and vertical refresh rates. I ended up setting them as high as I could,
and that plus the large screen size plus the r128 card did the trick. It felt like
voodoo.
2 Samba and Interfacing with the Windoze Net-
work
Since my workplace has a Windoze share that they use all the time, my biggest
concern with this install was interfacing with that in a reasonable manner. By
“reasonable” I do not mean big blue-and-green buttons with “click here to view
all files” tabs and talking paperclips (though you’re welcome to those if you
want — see vigor if you really want the paperclip!), but without having to
maintain a dual boot to Windoze.
This should have been easy. But since I didn’t know anything about kernel
modules, and little things went wrong, it was harder than it should have been.
2.1 Installing Samba
Like anything in Debian, installing samba is easy:
apt-get update
apt-get install samba smbclient
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But, because you’ll probably want to print, too, you’ll need all of the following (or so a website told me, and it worked):
apt-get install cupsys cupsys-bsd cupsys-client foomatic-bin samba
smbclient gs-esp a2ps
(You don’t have to do that now — if you don’t want to print, or don’t want
to do it through CUPS, only bother with the samba and smbclient packages.
2.2 Configuring Samba
I followed the instructions in the wonderful SMB HOWTO1for the basic configuration. The netbios lines were already in my /etc/services, and I uncommented the relevant netbios lines from my /etc/inetd.conf. They differed
slightly from the ones in the HOWTO .. .mine looked like this:
netbios-ns dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/nmbd -a
netbios-ssn stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/smbd
I think these lines are for running samba servers, which I’m not trying to
do (I just wanted to access samba shares as a client machine). You probably
don’t need them if you’re just a client machine, too, so you could safely skip
this section.
I didn’t need to do anything to my /etc/samba/smb.conf file (note the
slightly different location — no longer is it just in /etc) — I chose to manage
it with dpkg, and it generated a great one for me.
2.3 Using Samba
At this point, I could see the Windoze share I was going for:
smbclient -L <servername>
But I couldn’t mount it. Maybe you can — before you futz with other things,
try to mount the samba share you want so:
mount -t smbfs -o username=name,password=passwd //server/share /mountpoint
For this to work, however, you have to have smbfs in your kernel. I
didn’t, and I didn’t know how to put it there.
2.3.1 Getting smbfs in your kernel
This was the hard part for me. The first time, I tried to reroll my kernel
with smbfs support, and install that — I’d done it before, and make-kpkg (in
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http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SMB-HOWTO.html
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