laptop works! Yay!

Finally I got debian up and running. I've been working on GNU/Linux for so long that I've forgotten how to deal with Windows. The most basic, sureshot, nuke-'em kind of solution: Reinstall!

I reinstall XP. Put in the gateway address, the IP address, subnet mask, DNS IPs and viola! It Just Works (TM). So I hastily get Mozilla-Firebird for Windows (can't get no satisfaction from IE6), and start downloading patches, kernel source code, network drivers.

Finally the network under Debian worked. Hastily put in a sources.list for unstable and apt-getted :) But unstable still doesn't have XFree86 4.3 . Got an outside repository from apt-get.org and used that for getting 4.3. After that it was smooth sailing.

These pages were an immense help:

• http://ltswww.epfl.ch/~dsanta/resources/dell-i8500-linux
• http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/G.Wilford/Inspiron8500/
• http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/i8500/

The first link is particularly good. I still haven't got the ACPI to work very well. And X is not accerlerated. But it does come up in 1680x1050x24, which looks great. And unstable quite recent software: gnome/2.2, movie players, games, gnucash.

Here's hoping my hacking will take off from this point onward...