Dell Latitude CPi A300ST and Slackware Linux 10.0
This old(ish) Dell Latitude laptop has been my "test-bed" computer since I bought it second-hand. The
hard disk was wiped clean by the previous owner (a company), so there was no need to mess with dual-booting anyway.
Up to that I had been using Red Hat and Mandrake, but wanted to try "something completely different", so I
installed Slackware 8.1 on this machine. Soon after that I upgraded the o.s. to Slackware 9.0, and used it as such
for some time.
I hadn't used Red Hat since the version 7.3, so when Fedora Core 2 was released, I took the
opportunity to try it out, downloaded it and installed it on the Dell. However, there were some very serious problems
with FC2: I got occasional hangups at boot (every third time or so), or just after logging in, and the worst flaw in
FC2 was that I *never* got the PCMCIA NIC working, no matter what I did...
I never had any trouble with any
version of Slackware, and because the Slackware 10.0 was just then released, I thought it was time to switch back
using my trusty Slackware again :)
Installing the "Perfect Ten"
Well, there isn't much to say about the installation, everything went *so* smoothly... Because of the limited hard
drive space I installed only the Gnome Desktop. I had some prejudices against the new Gnome 2.6 "spatial"
interface, but actually I'm starting to like it! It looks very stylish, too, see the
screenshot up there.
I installed both 2.4.26 and 2.6.7 kernels to test the possible differences between the
two.
Rude noises
The only "fly in the ointment" is the sound chip, which in this Dell model is a Neomagic Corporation
NM2200 / MagicMedia 256AV Audio. According to the
ALSA website it seems that this sound chip is the only one for which the old OSS drivers are better than the ALSA
drivers. I seem to always have this kind of luck...
When booting the 2.6.7 kernel the machine sometimes hangs
when the hotplug script is being run, or sometimes when X starts. I get strange error messages from alsactl too, when
it tries to restore the mixer settings. Possibly this is the same bug(?) behind the troubles I had with FC2?
With the kernel 2.4.26 I turned the OSS drivers support back on (in /etc/hotplug/blacklist), and because Slackware
provides separate ALSA driver packages for each kernel version, I removed the 2.4.26 ALSA-driver package. No sound
problems whatsoever with this kind of setup, so it seems that I'll be using 2.4 series kernel with OSS drivers on
this machine, unless some kernel hacker comes up with suitable patch for this.
Somewhere over the rainbow
The default color reproduction of these old TFT's isn't the best possible. I made some experiments with different
gamma values and as a result noticed that I got the best (most natural) colors with the gamma set to the following
values:
Red: 1.0
Green: 0.8
Blue: 0.8
ToDo
I'd like to set up software suspend on this machine, but because of the 2.6-series kernel problems this means patching and recompiling the 2.4.26 kernel... on a 300 MHz computer... thank the Maker there is distcc...
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