Dell's Linux Compat

[green_man]

Justin Bennett wrote:

>I had a PII Latitude 450mhz. I had linux on it ran great. Can you get
>specifics on the video, sound, ect? Then you can check Hardware
>compatability list from redhat or whatever dist you want. As long as the
>hardware isn't too new it should be supported by the latest release of
>whatever distribution.
>
>Justin
>
Thanks for the input, all.

The Inspiron is the top of the line - all the bells and whistles - I'd 
love one !
The Latitude is a lower grade - bells, but no whistles.
A colleague at work just bought a used Latitude  with no OS for her 
home-run business, and had me do a scratch install of windows from MS-DOS.
The screen window was about the size of a 3x5 card. Once I got it in, I 
couldn't change the res, or make sound work because the necessary 
drivers were not found.
Apparently, once you register as the owner with Dell, you can go to the 
support site and enter the machine serial number, and it will tell you 
the the interface cards, chipsets and necessary drivers. Once she did 
that, she was able to run upgrades all the way up to XP Office  Pro, and 
get the res up to 1280x  from 640x, color from 16 colors to 16 million, 
and sound working. But, you have to register to find out what hardware 
you have.

What passed for BIOS didn't allow much more than specifying where to 
boot from, definitely not a BIOS as I recognize one.
I have discovered that as regards linux, older is better, because more 
people have the device in question, so there is more demand for some one 
to write the code to make it work in a linux environment.

-- 
Life is good when you're safely behind the times. 

Scott

Netscape 7.0 on Win 98 SE