Set-up of Fedora 8 on Dell Latitude D820

Alex Barnett, 1/17/08

If you want to understand the dual-boot config and partitioning first see my notes on the setup under Fedora Core 5

Hardware & status summary

CPU: Intel Core Duo T2500 @ 2GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB
BIOS A01 (whose menu appears only to be accessible at power-on)
hard drive: SATA 80GB 7200RPM
RAM: 2 x 1GB DDR2
8x DVD+-R/RW. Reading and burning (CDs 16x, DVD 4x) works out of box
15in WSXGA+ 1680x1050
GPU: nVidia Quadro NVS 120M. Accelerated graphics works after simple nvidia driver installation: I used version 169.07
- 3dMark05 score (in XP): 1933
- glxgears @ default size (linux): 2180 fps
9-cell 85 Whr battery (my experience: Li-ion will die in 1 yr if kept full and trickle-charged. You must do frequent discharge cycles. Even then after 15 months it has died to 1/3 initial capacity... kinda pathetic)
suspend/hibernate: Suspend works! (for first time ever in linux laptop setup, even with nvidia driver). Suspends on lid-close (most of the time). Haven't tested hibernate.
wireless: Intel 3945 integrated. Works out of the box (didn't associate upon 2nd boot up, but now is fine). NetworkManager seems a lot more reliable than in FC5.
4 USB 2.0 ports. Work out of box, including mounting ext drives and iPod
sound: Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family). snd_hda_intel driver works out of box with new pulseaudio platform Speakers, audio out fine.Recording from either integrated mic (near power LEDs), or from ext mic input (switchable via kaslamix mixer and no others so far).
touchpad: Synaptic. Works out of box. Can disable the annoying tap-to-click via synaptic settings in xorg.conf
weight: 6.5 lbs + 1 lb power adaptor
cost: $2100, incl $85 Microsoft `campus agreement', whatever that is.

Installation

I did a "Custom install" from DVD-ROM, which allowed me to preserve all my previous partitions (described in setup under FC5), apart from / and /boot which I wanted it to wipe clean and do a fresh install. In anaconda partition table editor, it was weird that I had to copy the LABEL information over to the mount points, since anaconda didn't know where any of the mount points were supposed to be.

I chose to customize the installed software choices based on prior experience.

For the dual-boot setup: Once F8 installed, boot from DVD/CD into read-only rescue mode, grab the boot partition start via,

dd if=/dev/sda3 of=linux_bootsec.bin bs=512 count=1

and scp linux_bootsec.bin somewhere. Boot up windows and scp it back to C:\, then edit the XP bootloader (after taking a backup of the file), boot.ini (which need to make visible via attrib -R -S -H C:\boot.ini from a command window) according to this guide. I changed the timeout to 3 sec, and made linux the default. There seems to be no problem with the BIOS 1024 cylinder limit (8.5GB) since my linux boot is over 10GB into the drive.

nVidia drivers

Download the latest driver (1679.07) from nVidia, put in /root/ and install as usual after any kernel changes. Here's my xorg.conf

Devices

User permissions on external drives. add
```
/dev/sdb2               /media/stanley          ext3    rw,users        0 0
```
to /etc/fstab and create /media/stanley
Audio recording, from external mic input. By default the pulseaudio system only shows 2 adjustable levels, master and capture in (eg type amixer to see what capabilities ALSA thinks the device has). However, the D820 High Def Audio (HDA) Intel controller is capable of more, such as choosing the input source (int/ext mic) as well as some discrete gain settings. The ONLY way I've found to control this is via kalsamix (previously known as kamix). I cannot find an RPM, so compiled this from source from sourceforge. Steps I needed for this were: install kdelibs-devel, do this link ln -s /usr/lib/qt-3.3 /usr/lib/qt3. I also tried adding options to the relevant driver module snd_hda_intel, by putting in /etc/modprobe.conf the following:
```
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-card-0 index=0 position_fix=1 model=ref
options snd-hda-intel index=0 position_fix=1 model=ref
```
This was inspired by this advice, but seems to have no effect: the following mixers still only see a single capture level control, and no course switch: gnome mixer, pulseaudio mixer, aumix, alsamixer.
iPod usage. Amarok seems to be best at managing a music collection and copying over to iPod (better than gnupod which I used to use painfully by hand, or gtkpod, which although has the feature of showing files in directory order, cannot copy multiple albums to iPod at once, ie it has no sync command). Here's how to sync all new songs in library over to the iPod:
```
1) Go to Playlists -> Smart Playlists -> Collection -> All Collection,
drag it over to right side (playlist). It will start playing - stop it!
2) Ctrl-A to Select all.
3) Click Devices, and iPod contents will show on left side.
4) Drag the highlighted block from right to left iPod window.
Lots of queued tracks to copy will show.
5) Finally hit Transfer (which now should be clickable).
```
I'm pretty sure this doesn't erase existing files on iPod.
A couple of times the hfsplus has mounted as read only; you will then need to use hpmount, failing that, is journaling has somehow been enabled, plug it in a Mac and do a diskutil disableJournal volumeName.
To organize MP3 collections and set Album, Artist, etc tags, install EasyTAG.

Other software

LaTeX: install gv
Install RPM of fabulous graphical text diff tool xxdiff from here (FC7 version works fine)
Install fonts freetype-freeworld from livna, msttcorefonts, and MS webcore fonts as described here
Compile emacs version 23 with Xft anti-aliased font support: first install giflib-devel, then follow these and these and these instructions. Namely,
```
cd ~; mkdir CVS; cd !$
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co -r emacs-unicode-2 emacs
cd emacs
./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft
setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
echo "Emacs.font: DejaVu Sans Mono-8" >> ~/.Xdefaults
```
I don't really know which fonts can be inserted in ~/.Xdefaults here. Note that emacs ignores fonts in ~/.emacs
Also note that emacs does not use the fonts perfectly: if you look very carefully you'll see that if a w, %, or @ are in the character before the cursor, they become bolder with each cursor flash (antialiasing doesn't work). This is pretty minor.
AucTeX
Numerical software development. Install atlas atlas-devel gsl gsl-devel
Multimedia software installation is well covered by Mauriat Miranda To get correct mplayer aspect ratio you'll need to add monitoraspect=16:10 to the file /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf.
Install googleearth, xcdroast, xfig, tetex-prosper. audacity in fedora-extras doesn't have mp3 support, and won't work even if you tell it where liblame.so is, so got audacity-nonfree from the Livna yum repo.
The baudline binary file nearly works (version 1.07), the problem being missing fonts in menus (this was not a problem for version 1.04 under FC5). This is fixed by installing xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-75dpi-7.2-3.fc8 package. Brilliant software, though (thank-you SigBlips!)
OpenGL software development. Install freeglut-devel, which also gives you the Mesa GLU libraries needed for Matlab below.
Install djvulibre for excellent compressed document viewer. Also xpdf.

Other configuration

.Xresources
I have a lot of problems choosing a font for xterm, since gnome seems to mess it up. Also the locations of xterm's can't be saved by save session. Bad.
.bashrc
Gnome: move panel to side since screen wide-aspect, install gconf-editor and remove Desktop icons in the Nautilus config. Change default terminal to xterm.
How edit the panel menu (what you get when right-click on empty desktop background) to include terminal? Install nautilus-open-terminal and restart session, as instructed
Is there a way to have sideways (vertical) text on the gnome Window List toolbar applet? That would be nice.
/etc/sudoers to include myself
/etc/ssh/ssh_config, add ForwardX11 yes
Append the following to /etc/rsyslog.conf (note no longer /etc/syslog.conf!) so you can easily flick over to syslog output to debug stuff:
```
# writes everything to Ctrl-Alt-F9 console.
*.*                                                     /dev/tty9
```
I also put the following in /etc/dhclient.conf so I have a guaranteed fixed alias on the network:
```
send host-name "whisky";
```
I set /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to have ONBOOT=no and USERCTL=yes

Remaining issues

When booting up at cold temperatures (eg freezing), fans go on on permanently and CPU speed is very slow (BIOS problem?)

Power comsumption

By checking /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state (takes 5 sec to update) you can compute power consumption in various states:

CPU0,1 idle (both 1Ghz)    wireless on      LCD max brightness            22W
CPU0,1 idle (both 1Ghz)    wireless on      LCD min brightness            17W
CPU0 100%, CPU1 idle       wireless on      LCD max brightness            26.5W
CPU0,1 both 100%           wireless on      LCD max brightness            33W
CPU0,1 idle (both 1Ghz)    wireless off     LCD max brightness            21W

So wireless consumes about 1+-0.2W (regardless of transmitting or receiving). LCD brightness range accounts for 3W, and both CPUs maxing out increases consumption by about 50%. Power consumptions are similar to the i8100 which only has one CPU.

Links and resources

You may want to compare my earlier FC4 and FC3 setup pages for the Dell Inspiron 8100.
At Linux on Laptops I found these other useful F8 on D820 pages: here.

Contact me at ahb at math dot dartmouth dot edu