Having a HELL of a fight with a Dell m1210 and FC6

[Raketemensch]

1) Sound was detected during installation. I tested it, everything worked, now without touching it, it's broken. All that shows up is the microphone. The dropdown box that lists "PCM device" is blank, so I cannot choose one. This is an 82801G chipset.

2) The display is not in 1280x800. Fedora detected the GeForce Go 7400 chip and configured for it, however it appears that the display SAYS it is 1280x800, while really showing 1024x768 stretched, which just longs wrong. xorg.conf is set to use 1280x800, if I view display properties it says I'm looking at 1280x800, but I don't believe it. Things are out of proportion.

3) I cannot get it to drive an external display, which is one of the reasons I bought this laptop. If I hit the fn-f8 key to use the external display, the flat panel tells me that it doesn't know what to do with the signal. When I hit fn-f8 to bring it back to the laptop display, I get only half the screen back. If I try doing dual-head setting everything exactly as it should work, specifying the Dell model of LCD exactly, X refuses to start up and I have to start over.

4) Wireless. I've upgraded to the 2.6.20 kernel, and things are not working properly. If I manually add the wireless access point (which does not boradcast itself) through NetworkManager, I get an IP address and everything is fine. When I reboot, I not only *don't* connect automatically, even connecting manually does not get me an IP address. I have to delete the connection and reboot, then re-add it manually to get it to work.

I am no n00b when it comes to linux, I've been using Redhat since 3.1, and FC since FC1. I work with Gentoo, Fedora, RHEL and Ubuntu on a daily basis. I have been at this for 3 days now and have never been so frustrated with a machine in my life.

ANY advice would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
Raketemensch

[jossebastian]

For (2) -> When I found my display was stretched, as you have mentioned, this is what I did...
in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "MyVideoCard"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

I first tried 1280x800 added in xorg.conf, but found that this one works correctly (for me).

You may want to try to install fglrx/nvidia drivers from livna, as well. For me, opensource or proprietary drivers make difference while running beryl. I am having ATI xpress 200m. I do no know what drivers you use, but proprietary may solve your issue (3).

For (4) -> With network manager, I got shoddy connection. I had bcm43xx wireless and my first problem was that wireless is not working at all with fedora provided bcm43xx drivers. I fixed that by using ndiswrapper. Then noticed the second problem with NetworkManager. If I get connection one time, then after reboot, I do not have connection. I try to connect, after like 10-20 attempts, i get connected. Or I have to reconfigure network. The solution was to remove Networkmanager and use Fedora's nework tool. Never failed since.

For (1) -> Sorry, I cant help you there. Dont know.

Jos

[gfenton]

What OS are you using?

Nvidia is VERY good about providing X11 drivers for Linux. Check out http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
You will have to kill X11 if you need to compile an X11 driver (a permanent approach is to edit /etc/inittab and set
id:3:initdefault:
to state 3 (as above). Reboot (or kill X11). Login at the "black window" prompt. Run the Nvidia file you downloaded above. To restart X11, type something like

/usr/X11R6/bin/startx >& ${HOME}/x.errs

Good luck with it.

[Dies]

For 2 & 3 you should try installing the Nvidia drivers

http://forum.fedoraforum.org/forum/s...46&postcount=4

See that post for Nvidia drivers through the Livna repo.

For 1 you're probably going to have to provide a little more info, maybe 'lspci' and 'lsmod' outputs would be helpful to someone familiar with your hardware.

For 4 you could probably 'hack' it with startup/shutdown scripts if it comes to that, being a Gentoo user you're probably familiar with that type of thing.

But I find that when I start getting frustrated it's usually something silly I overlooked.

[piecesnparts]

For the sound (#1) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=509778
but to sum it up Install the latest DKMS: http://linux.dell.com/dkms/ click on the most recent dkms
then install The Dell version of the snd-hda-intel drivers:
http://linux.dell.com/files/audio/in...kms.noarch.rpm
Edit modprobe.conf and comment out everything that has snd in it.
reboot. Open up your system-config-soundcard click on settings and change the default card to intel. You have to change it in a couple of places in system-config-soundcard it will tell you to reboot. reboot and it will work.