FreeBSD on an Inspiron 8000

• Video

  
  The video chipset in my laptop is an ATI Rage Mobility M4. For this to work you need XFree86 v4 which can be installed as a port during the installation process (skip the X stuff in sysinstall as it is X3.3.6 - this may change in 4.5 though). Here is a XFree86 v4 config to use. I have had success with the DRI which this config file. I can only use the DRI with a resolution of 1024x768 or less due to the limited video memory. Note that to use the DRI you will need to install (and start) the graphics/drm-kmod port before running the X server. Also the AGP module can not be loaded after boot so you should add the following to /boot/loader.conf

  agp_load="YES"
  

  
  Some newer versions have an nVidia GeForce 2Go chipset which is only supported using the Linux binary only driver. A shim to use this driver is available here.

• Sound

  The sound chipset is an ESS Maestro 3, the firmware for it is GPL'd so it is not possible to link the driver into the kernel, however it can be loaded as a KLD by adding the following line to /boot/loader.conf.

  snd_maestro3_load="YES"
  

• APM

  APM works fairly well and I just built the apm device into the kernel with..

  device          apm0    at nexus? flags 0x20
  

  I also have a set of Fiendish Scripts (tm) which handle refreshing the display on suspend/resume (use vidcontrol to switch to a text console on suspend and then back to X on resume). I have also setup suspend to disk and have made the suspend script set the boot block to boot off that partition when suspending then setting it back to boot off FreeBSD on resume (see boot0cfg).
  Here are my rc.suspend and rc.resume files.

• PCCARD

To get PCCARD working it was necessary to tell it to use IRQ 10 for managment in the kernel config, like so

device          card
device          pcic0   at isa? irq 10 port 0x3e0 iomem 0xd0000

Also I run pccardd from rc.conf

• USB

  USB Just Works with the standard driver, so you can kldload it, or let usbd do it. I've changed my usbd.conf file to reflect the fact that I have a scroll trackball..

  device "Mouse"
          devname "ums[0-9]+"
          attach "/usr/sbin/moused -p /dev/${DEVNAME} -I /var/run/moused.${DEVNAME}.pid -z 5 -r high -F 200 -a 0.8"
  

  Note that USB didn't use to work on resume but a patch to /usr/src/sys/pci/uhci_pci.c fixed that. Hopefully this patch will be committed soon.

• Suspend to Disk

To get this working it was necessary for me to completely reinstall my system as the S2D partition seems to need to be at the beginning of the drive otherwise it won't work - The KB article indicates it needs to be in the first 8.4Gb so I just put it first. You can obtain the S2D partition creation tool from here. Or maybe here. The Dell web site sucks. If you can't find it I can mail it to you, I can't remember which tool I used but you can try both and see which one produces a working result :)

• Modem/Ethernet

  I opted for the inbuilt ethernet and modem combo, and the result was a Intel EtherExpress Pro for ethernet (wohoo!) and a WinModem (not so wohoo). The ethernet card works fine as is. The WinModem _does_ work after the work of a very nice person who wrote a shim for the binary only driver. If you install the comms/ltmdm port it will install this driver for you.

• Misc Stuff

  Because my hostname changes between work and home I have 'xhost +localhost' in my .xsession file otherwise when the hostname changes no X applications can connect to the server.