crafterm's weblog: Inspiron Time!

April 14, 2003

Inspiron Time!

It's finally arrived! This morning I took delivery of my brand new Dell Inspiron 8500 (larger image), and I've been playing with it non-stop all day! :)

Its a Pentium 4M, 2.2 Ghz system with 512 mb DDR-RAM, 60 gb HDD, 15.4" WUXGA display, NVidia GeForce 4200 Go 64 mb, Bluetooth, plus more. The WUXGA display is particularly awesome, currently it's running at a resolution of 1920x1200 and it's unbelievably sharp and clear.

Many thanks to Jens at Dell! :)

As you can probably see, Windows XP is currently installed, but I'm looking forward to putting Debian GNU/Linux on it too :)

Posted by crafterm at April 14, 2003 09:30 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Hi,

I'm interested to hear your experiences with
Linux on your new Inspiron 8500, specifically
with X. I'm seriously considering this model
laptop, but if it can't run X, I won't get it.

Thanks,

Greg

Posted by: Greg H. at April 17, 2003 06:21 AM

Hi Greg,

X runs fine on this notebook. I have the NVidia GeForce4 4200 Go graphics card which is supported by the standard XFree86 and binary only NVidia drivers for X.

There's an example XFree86 config available at http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/G.Wilford/Inspiron8500/#X__1920x1200_-_AGP4x:_Nvidia_Geforce4 as well. I'll also publish my findings on a website once I've finished setting up the system.

Cheers,

Marcus

Posted by: Marcus Crafter at April 22, 2003 08:51 AM

What is the state of debian on your notebook? You shouldn't leave xp on it for too long as it is likely to leave permanent damage to the hardware - I swear ...

Posted by: Mariano at April 22, 2003 04:04 PM

Hi Mariano,

*smile*, don't worry, Debian is up and running well. Still have a lot of configuring to do, but it's definitely usable.

One of the best parts: 4377.80 BogoMIPS

Certainly beats my previous PIII 500Mhz PC :)

Cheers mate!

Marcus

Posted by: Marcus Crafter at April 22, 2003 04:35 PM

I've been running Debian/testing on the laptop for a while now. Simply amazing! And X works very well too :)

Posted by: aaditya sood at November 25, 2003 08:00 AM

I've been trying to install the debian distribution on my 8500, but I can't launch startx at all (seems to be a problem with the Nvidia card)... Can anyone send me a working config sothat i may compile the kernel?

Thanks

Posted by: Mathieu G. at December 2, 2003 06:59 PM

Thanks

Posted by: Mathieu G. at December 2, 2003 06:59 PM

Hi, how is your debian system running?
i am looking forward to install debian on a partition on my own inspiron 8500, but am not sure wheter to use NTloader or lilo
maybe you are using loadlin - but i prefer not to have around a boot-usb-stick all the time

do you have any experience with this matter?
would be great if you can help me. simply drop a message into my mailbox

thanks

dietmar

Posted by: Dietmar at January 16, 2004 04:14 PM

Hi Dietmar,

Debian is running fine mate, thanks for asking. I don't use NTloader nor lilo - I'm using grub. I find it much better to use, plus it gives you a boot splash screen and a console to manually select boot options if needed.

Mathieu, are you using the NVidia binary driver? I didn't have any problems with this driver - make sure you've specified nvidia in your /etc/X11/XF86Config file.

Cheers,

Marcus

Posted by: Marcus Crafter at August 19, 2004 05:03 PM