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:

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

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

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

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SMB-HOWTO.html

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