HARDWARE Dell XPS Gen 2

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This article is part of the Hardware series.
Laptops • TV Tuner Cards • Wireless • Servers • Storage • Other Hardware • Motherboards • Related
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Contents

[edit] General

I put together this document to help you setup Gentoo Linux on your Dell XPS Generation 2 Laptop. I found a lot of this information on different places in the gentoo forumand on lots of other places on the internet. This is not about installing gentoo but it's about getting the hardware to work under gentoo. If you are looking for information on how to get gentoo installed on your XPS Gen 2, i suggest you follow the gentoo installation documentation here. If you really want to get the most out of this great laptop;-) you might want to have a look at thisgentoo forum thread. I decided to use the Stage 1/3 method because i wanted to have a pentium-m optimized system. The pentium-m cpu is only supported with gcc 3.4.4

[edit] News

Please be patient, this is work in progress. New information will be added when available.

03.03.2006 added Chapter about Nec DVD +-RW

[edit] Hardware

[edit] Specifications

Processor

Intel Pentium M 770 2,13 GHz
Intel Centrino Mobile Technology

Memory

2048 MB, DDR2-533 Dual-Channel

Display

17" TFT WUXGA+ Display (Resolution 1920x1200)

Video Card

Nvidia Geforce Go 6800 Ultra, 256 MB

Hard Drive

100 GB FUJITSU MHV2100A SATA

Optical Drives

NEC ND-6500A

Sound Cards

Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW AC'97 Audio Controller

Modems

Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW AC'97 Modem Controller

Network Interface

Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet

Wireless Networking

Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG MiniPCI Adapter


I/O Ports

PC-Card
1 VGA
1 S-Video-out
1 DVI-D
6 USB 2.0
1 Serial Port: 9-pin connector
1 Firewire
1 Line-out
1 Microfon
1 Modem RJ-11 connector
1 Ethernet: RJ-45 connector
1 SD-Card-Reader

Batteries

Code: lspci output 
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3)
0000:00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.3 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV41.9 [GeForce Go 6800 Ultra] (rev a2)
0000:03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5705M_2 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 03)
0000:03:01.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b3)
0000:03:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 08)
0000:03:01.2 Class 0805: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 17)
0000:03:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG MiniPCI Adapter (rev 05)



[edit] Ethernet Card (Driver)

The ethernet card is a Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit and works just fine with the Kernel supplied Tigon 3 driver, so just make sure you have enabled it in your kernel.

  • Enable the tg3 device driver in the kernel.
  • Create a link net.eth0 -> net.lo in /etc/init.d/
  • rc-update add net.eth0 boot
  • (optional) setup eth0 in /etc/conf.d/net



[edit] Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG with Intel 2200BG driver

A lot of information is available on the Gentoo Forums. I still want to explain the process i used to get the card working. There have been some issues with ipw2200 and recent kernel versions (as of this writing 2.6.13-r5), if you are interested to read about those issues search the gentoo forum with ipw2200.

Code: Emerging the software 
emerge ipw2200 wpa_supplicant
ln -s net.lo net.ethx (whatever number your wlan card is)
rc-update add net.ethx default (optional)


I don't use the wireless-tools cause my access point uses WPA encryption, therefore i configured my card to use wpa_supplicant.

File: /etc/conf.d/net 
modules="wpa_supplicant"
wpa_supplicant_ethx="-D wext"

You also need to customize /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf according to your network/ap settings. In case you use an ascii passphrase with wpa-psk don't forget to issue the following command :

Code: wpa_passphrase your_ssid your_asccii_passphrase

[edit] NEC DVD+-RW ND 6500A

Don't be surprised if you find your NEC DVD Burner being showed as /dev/hdc i.e it looks like it is an IDE Drive. Output of lspci shows the following.

Code: lspci output 
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 03)


Bottomline the drive performance is very bad, not even fast enough for DVD playing. It feels like an IDE drive that is not using DMA. The laptop uses a SATA to PATA bridge for the DVD drive and you will not be able to set DMA on the device as is. I use the SATA drivers rather than the IDE drivers as they are faster. However, some people notice more issues with the SATA drivers (ie. failed burning, some DVDs wont play etc.). You can find everything to make this work here and here. There are still issues with older kernels, so make sure you use the latest stabel kernel 2.6.15-r1 as of this writing.

[edit] Updating the Bios

See this HowTo.

[edit] ACPI Power Management

Nothing special here there is a good guide in the gentoo documentation. Just follow it. I had one problem with cpu frequency scaling. For some reason i got error messages from cpufreq-info when i compiled the fdriver into the kernel.

Code: cpufreq-info 
cpufrequtils 0.3: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004
Report errors and bugs to linux@brodo.de, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
no or unknown cpufreq driver is active on this CPU


To solve the problem, change your kernel config and compile the driver as a module. Then do a modprobe speedstep-centrino. That solved it, you should see something like the following from cpufreq-info.

Code: cpufreq-info 
cpufrequtils 0.3: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004
Report errors and bugs to linux@brodo.de, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
driver: centrino
CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0
hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.13 GHz
available frequency steps: 2.13 GHz, 1.87 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.33 GHz, 1.07 GHz, 800 MHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, powersave, userspace, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 2.13 GHz.
                The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                within this range.
current CPU frequency is 2.13 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).

[edit] Links

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