Linux on a Dell Inspiron 3500.

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Note: This document is incomplete. However, the most important part is complete. If you have problems with sound after a suspend/resume cycle go to the nifty sound fix section.

It took me quite a while to work around some quirks with my Dell Inspiron 3500, so I figure, anyone else trying to install Linux may want to know how I did it.

My instructions are going to be fairly generic, so the distro of linux you are using should not matter. The only thing my instructions do expect is that you are running one of the latest 2.4 kernels.

If you are curious, I have installed Gentoo Linux 1.2 and I am using kernel 2.4.18 with the Preemptible Kernel Patch. The patch should not be necessary, I just prefer to use it on my workstations.

The biggest problem I had with getting my laptop working to my liking was the sound support. After a suspend/resume cycle, the sound driver fails to work properly. So after tons of time searching the Internet looking for someone else whom had found the answer to my problems, I did find one person who had fixed a similar problem with a 2.2 kernel. To give him credit, his website is located at http://pont.net/linux/linuxI3500.html. That site, however, states that the 2.4 kernel no longer works for sound, which I have proven wrong. If you came here specifically for this purpose skip to the nifty sound fix section.

An ouput of /sbin/lspci shows a handful of my hardware:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX Host bridge (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX AGP bridge (rev 03)
00:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1220 (rev 02)
00:04.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1220 (rev 02)
00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82371AB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Neomagic Corporation [MagicMedia 256AV] (rev 20)
01:00.1 Multimedia audio controller: Neomagic Corporation [MagicMedia 256AV Audio] (rev 20)

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Nifty Sound Fix
In the bios, I set my sound config to manual. I chose all of the defaults for the I/O and DMA stuff. And different that every other document on the Internet that I had found, I chose IRQ 5.

In BIOS Terms:

Audio:        Customized
SB I/O address:    220
WSS I/O address:   530
AdLib I/O address: 388
Interrupt:         IRQ 5
1st DMA channel:   0
2nd DMA channel:   1

For my kernel sound options:

Sound  --->
  <M>   Sound card support
    <M>   OSS sound modules
	 <M>   Adlib Cards (?Optional?)
	 <M>   Loopback MIDI device support (?Optional?)
	 <M>   Microsoft Sound System support
	 <M>   100% Sound Blaster compatibles ...

Note: I have not bothered trying to get midi working so the Adlib and Loopback MIDI stuff is assumed to be needed for that.

Initially the sound module I use is the Microsoft Sound System support. Set this up however you choose, but essentially I run.

/sbin/modprobe ad1848 io=0x530 irq=5 dma=0 dma2=1

And this should work for you up until the point your machine goes to standby mode. With apmd, you can set it up to run scripts on a resume. You will have to research how to do this on your distro since I imagine each are slightly different. I can tell you that you should look into apmd_proxy part of apmd. The script that I have written for a resume is:

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/modprobe -r ad1848
/sbin/modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=0 dma16=1
/sbin/modprobe uart401
/sbin/modprobe -r sb
/sbin/modprobe ad1848 io=0x530 irq=5 dma=0 dma2=1
# Note: The above will fix your sound.  However, I have had a problem
#       with some of my pcmcia stuff breaking, so I also restart it.
#       The following lines are optional depending on if your run into 
#       this problem or not.
/etc/init.d/pcmcia stop
/etc/init.d/pcmcia start