2008-02-26

Gentoo GNU/Linux on Dell XPS M1730 (Part 2)

I have made significant progress on this project and have decided to continue with my findings so far.

I fixed the sound problem. Seems that snd-hda-intel was broken in alsa-1.0.14 (from kernel 2.6.20 - 2.5.22). I simply emerged the latest kernel, and now it works! even with surround!!

Next up I got TwinView working (finally). Seems that the nvidia driver thinks that my LCD (2702WFP) is a CRT, so I plugged in a DVI-VGA converter on the notebooks DVI port and hooked the LCD up via VGA (DB15 - DB15) cable and now she works. Interestingly enough, TwinView uses a form of xinerama, so all I had to do to stop getting a desktop stretched across both screens (and apps placed between both monitors), was to add USE="xinerama" into make.conf and re-emerged everything (emerge -uDavN) and now the WM detects the boundaries between displays!!!

TODO List
Wireless: I have installed ipw3945, but according to the Gentoo Wiki ipw3945 Hardware Article, it seems that iwlwifi is both newer and easier to implement and it will be available in gentoo-sources-2.4.24, but since it's masked, I'm reluctant to use it.

Software Suspend (to disk): This will be very important especially when using this beast at UNI. As I mentioned above, the 2.6.24 kernel has iwlwifi inbuilt, but I realised that the tuxonice-sources is at 2.4.24 (masked) so why not "kill two birds with one stone"?

TavelRemote: Since I also use this system to watch stuff (on the 27" monitor), it would be nice to be able to utilise lirc with the travel remote.

g15 GamePanel: According to some users, it's possible to use this via the g15tools, but it is low priority for me, since I use this thing as desktop-like system, where I can't even see the damn thing :P

MultiMedia Keys: This is yet another low-priority job. I will tinker again with xmodmap and app support to see if I can get it working in the future.

Who needs Microsoft® Windows™? Not me!


UPDATE: 26/02/2008 @ 1353
I discovered that the g15 Gamepanel is now working!
I had the g15daemon and libg15 stuff emerged a while back but I never noticed it working until now (I suspect the the newer kernel-2.6.23 has made a difference).

 
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