This is a continuation and update to the previous howto that I have made for Red Hat. A lot has changed in the year and a half when I first purchased this laptop and I'd like to make a more though howto for setting up Linux on the Dell Inspiron 600m.
If you have ever installed Gentoo you will know that it is not the simplist to install, but if you walk through the Gentoo Handbook the install is straight forward.
Using the Minimal LiveCD you may need to set the display to 1400x1050 by entering "gentoo screen=1400x1050" in the boot prompt.
The installer should detect the network card with no problems and will automaticly run dhcpcd to grab an IP Address if there is a DHCP server available.
The rest of the install you can follow straight through the manual, until the kernel install/compile.
My latest kernel config can be found here
Early April 2004 Intel started the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Driver for Linux project. Currently it is on version 1.1.1 and is very stable and reliable. Installation is also easy thanks to the community contributions.
On newer 600m laptops they use the IPW2200 chip which is an 802.11g card, that also has it's own project (an off-shoot of the IPW2100) at Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG Driver for Linux which started in July and has also made lots of advancements.
As of kernel version 2.6.14 Intel Pro Wireless drivers are included in the kernel itself, just be sure to compile it as a module or it won't load properly
The 2.6 kernels introduced Centrino specific modules to further enhance power management and battery life. The battery is properly detected and read by the kernel so apps like gKrellM will properly display the battery state.
Gentoo does not have any default tools available to handle many of the laptop features one takes for granted when owning a laptop, but just like everything else there is a way.
X.org has officially replace XFree as the standard for Linux graphical display server. Since Xorg is a fork off the XFree tree before the license change late 2003 there is not much difference. X.org is very active and new features and fixes are added all the time.
On my model of the 600m it has a default resolution of 1400x1050, which looks very nice even if it makes things a bit small. Here's the xorg.conf that I have been using with the ATI drivers.
I have the Radeon 9000m graphics card (or Radeon 9M) and upgraded to the 64MB model, and works using the regular ATI Radeon Linux drivers which my kernel is configured to use. Using the Gentoo emerge ati-drivers and then opengl-update ati and editing the xorg.conf give fairly well OpenGL performance. Good enough to play Unreal Tournament 2004 without major problems.
For full screen to work in lots of games use 1152x864 for the resolution setting as most games do not support the 1400x1050, otherwise most other resolutions leave you with a black display.
I'm using the kernel ALSA modules (compiled as modules as I've found audio modules to be more reliable then built into the kernel), Intel i8x0 driver for audio and modem. To use the modem you will need the Intel i8x0m module which is found with the audio driver called CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0 in the kernel config (or with menuconfig Device Drivers --> Sound --> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture --> PCI devices --> Intel/SiS/nVidia/AMD/ALi AC97 Controller and Intel/SiS/nVidia/AMD MC97 Modem)
With the intel8x0m module loaded the modem works with no problems using any dialing software that support wvdial. Only problem I've found is that the modems speaker doesn't work so you'll need to rely on system messages instead of audio.
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