HARDWARE Dell Latitude D520

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

This lists just some of the hours of work required to get the D520 functional under Gentoo.

Contents 1 DMA and Hard Drive 2 Wireless 3 CD-Rom and Hard Drive 4 Video 5 Alsa and Sound 6 Skype

[edit] DMA and Hard Drive

Follow this guide: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4570091.html#4570091 Thanks to NeddySeagoon for this.

[edit] Wireless

Just make sure you use the IPW3945 version > 1.1.3-r2, which may be hard masked on your system as it requires a 2.6.19 kernel. This version stops a number of annoying bugs and uses the kernels built in ieee80211 support. It allowed me to use netsniffer and make hibernate work properly.

[edit] CD-Rom and Hard Drive

In the new 2.6.19 kernels, DMA for the DVD drive is now supported so I recommend you grab at least that version. Just make sure you enable it in the sata section.

[edit] Video

See this HowTo.

[edit] Alsa and Sound

The driver is the PCI intel HD audio and I recommend building it into the kernel (I dont generally build as modules as a rule). However, in order to get recording working you MUST pass the following option to the driver

snd-hda-intel.model=ref

Add this as a kernel parameter in your boot loader. For example in grub

kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3 snd-hda-intel.model=ref

Now just load your mixing program (I use kmix) and play with the settings until it works. Note: the laptop has an internal mic of poor quality

[edit] Skype

Get the latest masked version of Skype (1.3+) by adding it to your keywords file. This enables alsa support. In your kernel you must set

Processor type and features >> Timer frequency >> 1000hz

I didn't try 250hz but 1000 gives great recording performance