HARDWARE Dell Latitude X200

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[edit] General

The Dell Latitude X200 is very similar to the Asus S5N. With a few minor exceptions (BIOS, NIC, etc) it is almost identical. The Asus S5N hardware page is a useful resource for the Dell X200 therefore.

[edit] Booting the Gentoo LiveCD

An apparent early timeout causes a Gentoo LiveCD to fail to detect the firewire DVD drive mounted in the Media Base quickly enough to boot properly when launched on this platform.

A work-around for this problem is to boot with the dopcmcia option:

boot: gentoo dopcmcia dofirewire

This appears to slow things down enough that the CD-ROM drive is detected and mounted properly, and the LiveCD boot proceeds as normal.

NOTE: This option does not appear to work with the 2005.0 Gentoo release. A work-around to the work-around is to boot with an older Gentoo LiveCD (this is known to work with version 2004.0 and 2004.3 LiveCDs) and to proceed to install the latest release of Gentoo from an alternative source. If the boot CD-ROM drive is required for installation, use the docache option to load the older release LiveCD into RAM, then umount and eject the CD and replace it with the current version.

boot: gentoo docache dopcmcia

[edit] BIOS

You may enter the Dell Bios by pressing F2 at boot time. Unless disabled in BIOS, pressing F12 at boot time will present a choice of boot devices. The boot device menu does not necessarily display all possible choices - individual items may be added or removed from the boot device menu from within the BIOS.

[edit] Network Controller

Relevant hardware:

• Ethernet controller: Broadcom 570x Gigabit Integrated Controller

This card works with the Tigon3 driver.

Device Drivers  --->
   Networking support  --->
      [*] Networking support
          Ethernet (1000 Mbit)  ---> 
            [*] Broadcom Tigon3 support 

Source for the official Broadcom network drivers are available from the Broadcom driver download page.