On Saturday 27 November 2004 09:19 pm, Ian K. Harrell wrote:
I am looking for any information anyone might have concerning installing suse 9.1 on a dell inspiron 1150 laptop.
I have one purchased a few months ago and now runs 9.1.
I downloaded the eval DVD and it seemed to boot ok but I was unable to check the operation of the sound card, the ethernet card, the modem and the wireless 802.11g card.
Mine never did run the eval dvd worth a darn so dont judge it by that. Be sure it has the latest bios upgrade. As mine shares memory it must have the bios upgraded to be useable at the higher resolutions. Installation goes easier too.
For the time being this system will be dual booting with XP due to work requirements.
If the sound card and modem are a problem I can live without them but I must be able to get the ethernet and wireless card operational in linux.
The sound works fine but I havent had any need to use the modem so I'm not sure about that one. I have the 1350 wireless installed. It is a broadcom based nic and worked satisfac torily with the ndiswrapper until one of my upgrades which hosed the drivers. I then installed the linuxant driver and the 19 bucks was well worth it. Not a problem since. And they have the ability to do wap security although I havent downloaded the stuff to do so. On installation the tapping on the touchpad didnt work. That was solved by booting into level 3 and running sax2. Running the input selection section gives you a driver for the synaptics touchpad and while being very sensitive, it makes all the features of the touchpad work. You will probably have to reduce the sensitivity of the pad as it was very annoying to me. When I bought mine the pentium 4 was an option so I got the celeron. The P4 should be a much better cpu. All in all I think it was a good buy. BUT beware, the Dell customer support is spotty at best. Although they have a customer satisfaction guarantee, it is only about 3 weeks long and the time starts to run when they ship. Mine completely died just after the 3rd week. I spent many hours on the phone to India, Philipenes, Panama, Round Rock, TX, Nashville, and someplace in Michigan to finally get them to replace the unit. I also sent a half dozen emails to Customer Service and their VP. After a week they sent me a new one and THEY paid for shipping both ways. The second unit has performed flawlessly. Good luck, Richard
Hardware specs on this system are as follows: - Dell Inspiron 1150 - Pent 4 @ 2.66GHz - 512 Ram - Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller (this seemed to work ok with the eval-DVD, but I didn't do a lot of testing with it) - Synaptics PS2 Port Pointing Device (touchpad) - Broadcom BCM V.92 56k Modem - Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller (ethernet) - Dell wireless WLAN 1350 802.11G mini-pci card (I understand this is also made by broadcom for dell but I could not confirm this nor find broadcom's model # if it's true) - SigmaTel C-Major AudioIntel 82801DB/DBM USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller - 24CD
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