This weekend, I managed to get my Dell Inspiron Mini 9, christened ebony, up and running reliably on Fedora 10 Beta. I’ve had the Mini for a little more than a week, and immediately installed Fedora, using the Fedora Live USB1. The initial F10 install was a reasonably smooth process; sufficiently so that I denuded the machine of its Intel and Winders decalomania, and replaced the stickers with the Shadowman.
Everything but wireless worked out of the box, on first boot. A little research revealed that the Broadcom wifi card has no native Fedora drivers; I could have downloaded and compiled them. This isn’t a big deal from an initial installation standpoint; as kernel upgrades come down2, I’d be spending an inordinate amount of time recompiling and reinstalling drivers. NetworkManager has also let me down when I’ve used non-native drivers. So, I ordered an Intel 3945 Mini PCI-E card from Amazon; that arrived on Thursday. Somehow, I didn’t break nor jimmy any teensy leads on the card, and didn’t lose any of the teensy screws holding the card in place. I’m not particularly delicate, being a charter member of the Get a Bigger Hammer Club, so I was pleased that on reboot, Fedora recognized the card, and NetworkManager got me on the interwebs. By now, my giddy smugness took over, and typed “yum update”. 450 MB later, a reboot, and I have a Brick formerly known as Dell. It simply will not boot, not into single user mode, not into rescue mode. I have external devices, USB, and USB/DVD, and tried both of those. Boots just hang.
Now, I’m worried. I had ovbiously voided any and all warranties at this point. I didn’t want to call Dell shamefacedly and beg forgiveness, and throw myself on their mercy. Nope. I’m gonna make this thing work. I ran all the Mini diagnostics that came with the box. Everything, memory, CPU, etc, checked out fine. Encouraging.
Still, the system does not boot. Even off the USB stick that had provided a flawless install before. What changed? The wireless card. I disabled WLAN in the BIOS, rebooted from the USB, and installed away. On first reboot, I had no wireless (duh), so I added
alias iwl3945 wlan0
to /etc/modprobe.conf, turned WLAN back on in the BIOS, and rebooted. NetworkManager offered a list of wireless networks, I provided it with the tbbs-land SSID and WPA keys, and once again, I’m on the interwebs.
Lots of hand-to-laptop combat there, but the Dell is humming along now. Much better than it would be had I played discus with it. Which at one point was an option.
-k-
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Wait. Dell is selling this thing with an unsupported WiFi card? That makes no sense at all.
When Ubuntu dropped (or whatever they did) support for the Broadcom chipset in 8.x, I went back to 7.10.
PS How’s the keyboard?
Scott:
The Broadcom isn’t supported in Fedora. Dell has a lower-end (basically a 4 GB drive; mine has a 16GB drive) Mini that comes with Ubuntu preloaded. So either Ubuntu has a Broadcom driver, or the wifi card is different. I guess a real geek would have downloaded and compiled the Broadcom driver; this gets to be a real PITA when kernels upgrade frequently, as they are wont to do in Fedora Rawhide. My guess is that the Broadcom card would have been OK on Winders.
As far as keyboard goes, don’t get me started. The keys are nicely-sized, but the layout can only be described as bizzare. I’m working on a little post comparing the Asus eeePC 701 vs the Dell Mini. Stay tuned for more.
-k-
As you note, getting Broadcom support in the new Ubuntu is a mess, so I don’t. I’m running 7.x on my test lab desktop and the cheapie wifi cards w/ BC work wonderfullt. Wonder why Fedora doesn’t have it at all, though. Seems counter to the Linux worldview.
The layout wouldn’t bother me as much as being to fit my big old fingers on home row. Remember home row? I wonder if anyone still teaches that?
Looking forward to your comparison post. I want one of these for couch surfing like right now when M’ville and the Pokes are on.