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Dell M65
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Dell-M65 /
IndexInstalling Linux on a Laptop (DELL PRECISION M65, and others)It's not about the system just working - It's about the system working efficiently. For the sake of a few tweaks, you can get so much more out of your hardware. That's what this site hopes to achieve (For any laptop, not just this particular make/model - so even if you don't have the same laptop as me, hopefully you will find something of interest and help here). This collection of pages is really an aide-memoir (I have a habit of deleting / breaking currently installed systems) to remind me how I configured things last time, and areas of research that I haven't had time to follow up on yet. If you find these pages useful, but notice an omission, error, or area which needs updating, please drop me a line. This is work in progress, moving towards optimum configuration. Cheers. General rational: Absolutely EVERYTHING should work [1]. Not only that, but it should work as efficiently as possible. Therefore, my distro of choice is Gentoo (Having said that, in playing around installing various distro's, Gentoo was the ONLY automated installer to choke, and screw up my drive, deleting all the partitions and rendering the system inoperable - GOD! I hate automatic installation utilities). However, I generally play with several other distro's, so you may find other notes here too. All KERNEL settings refer to LINUX-2.6.21 with patches added (gentoo-sources). Pages here have my kernel configuration attached. For those who prefer a micro-kernel, module names have been included. Generally speaking, setting up Linux on the Precision M65 is relatively easy - as far as laptops go. However, there is still work to do - don't expect everything to work out-of-the-box. Some features you may not get working at all. TPM remains a serious issue for me, due to a lack of drivers. I hope this will be resolved, as it was an important consideration in the purchase decision, and the lack of hardware support prevents me from making a professional recommendation for its use. (See TPM section for further info) Summary: Overall, so far, a nice laptop. I cannot imagine needing a higher resolution LCD panel, despite having the option. Likewise, I feel a 17" laptop would not be portable enough for my personal requirements. My fear of having a noisy fan to cope with has mainly been appeased, though it is more than I would like. That said, 99% has been used on mains power so far. I still wish, however, that DELL's pricing policy was more transparent, and did not require so much haggling.
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