Last night I bit the bullet and installed Slackware on my Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. After poring over the I8K pages on Linux on Laptops and backing up all of my data on Saturday, I sat down in front of the tube to catch the Hall of Fame game while burning through the install.

The laptop’s got a 700MHz processor, so it’s still got some life in it. It’s up to 384MB of RAM, but only has a 10GB hard disk which, sadly, I’m stuck with for the time being. It’s also got the 16MB ATI Mobility M4 graphics card, a DVD drive, and a 14.1″ screen. It also has an internal modem and NIC, firewire and USB, and I’ve got an Orinoco wireless PC card.

The installation went surprisingly smooth. I installed a 50MB /boot partition at the front of the drive, followed by a 512MB swap partition, and left the rest to / (root). I normally like to put /home on its own partition for future reinstalls, but I figure I’ll just run into space issues down the road by parceling out only 9GB and change. I also chose the full install (all packages) because I’d rather watch the game than read through the menus. It totaled a little over 2.5GB of software.

Folks on the Linux on Laptops links had me expecting three minor problem areas: 1) video; 2) DMA and hard drive speed; 3) PCMCIA support; 4) sound support.

The video turned out to be a non-issue. The reported concerns were about the nVidia chip and the proprietary drivers, but Slackware got my ATI video up and running with zero problems. X worked out of the box. And even if I did have nVidia, I’ve been through the nVidia driver install on my tower and it’s not near as painful as some make it out to be.

Running hdparm showed DMA already enabled. Others’ initial installs showed hard drive speeds down around 3MB/sec, but mine was upwards of 16-17MB/s.

A lot of people reported lockups at boot related to PC card issues, and recommended the installation of the pcmcia-cs package to resolve it. Slackware 10 already comes with the package (unless it’s been integrated into the kernel — not sure), so I had no problems.

Sound didn’t work at first, but after uncommenting the appropriate line in /etc/rd.d/rc.modules, I was in business. I quickly discovered that there are a lot of irritating sound effects under the default KDE 3.2. I’ll be getting rid of them soon.

I was concerned myself about support for the Orinoco card, but it also turned out to be a non-issue. Running ifconfig -a showed the card had indeed been identified, however, I had no Internet connectivity despite telling the system to configure it via DHCP. Turns out that had nothing to do with Slackware. No, this is all me as I realized I’d never had to configure wireless on Linux before, and had no idea where to start. This O’Reilly article pointed me in the right direction with iwconfig, and I assigned the SSID for my Linksys WAP. That established a decent radio connection, but I still had no network connectivity.

I browsed through some of the KDE menus, and while I discovered it had quite a bit more than what Red Hat normally provides, it was also missing things like Red Hat’s network config utilities. My ifconfig skillz are rough and it was getting late, so I’ll be tackling the networking this evening.

Overall, I’m very happy with the end result. Also on the to-do list is tweaking the screen resolution and making sure I’ve got a good X.org config (Slackware doesn’t walk you through X configuration like some installers) that won’t fry my screen, and then setting up KPPP to make sure the modem works for when I’m on the road with no broadband. I’ll follow up here again later for those who are interested.

In the coming days/weeks I plan to tinker with rsync, scp and nfs, and I’ll be sure to share those experiences as well.