Gateway M325X Review and Setup Tips By Scotty Fitzgerald Copyright (c) 2005 Scotty Fitzgerald
Summary: The Gateway M325X is an excellent Pentium M4 computer which works with Debian Sarge Linux, except for the sound card. Tips are given to help the reader set up Debian Sarge Linux on this computer. I've recently purchased a Gateway M325X Laptop computer to use with Debian Sarge Linux. I wanted to relate my experience and give a few tips to others who may want to get this Laptop computer and use Debian on it. Essentially, you can have a terrific Pentium M4 Laptop and run Sarge on it, and have everything work except the sound card. I purchased this Gateway over a Linux pre-loaded computer and I figure I managed to save about $1k dollars in this way. It would have been much easier to buy a pre-loaded one, but I would have missed that money, as well as controlling which packages were actually running on the computer. The computer ships with the following: Intel 915 GM chipset motherboard LCD screen 60Hz 800x600 or 1024x768 modes Broadcom b57 wired lan Intel IPW2200 Wireless Lan .5 gb ram Softmodem, of which the sound card is a sub-component 40gb hard drive One PCMCIA slot (type two) firewire and USB ports Setup Notes. 1) You need to use the the 2.6 kernel, not the 2.4. You will have troubles with the xserver, and dynamic CPU speed throttling if you don't. 2) When prompted for Ethernet card type, choose tg3. This will enable wired ethernet on interface eth0. 3) Use "expert mode" installation from your disk set. After installing Grub but before rebooting, invoke a shell. You won't be able to boot unless you stop hotplug from attempting to load Intel sound card drivers. Get to the file /etc/hotplug/blacklist and add the following lines. i810_audio snd_intel8x0 4) While your in this shell, get to the file /etc/modules and add the following lines acpi cpufreq_userspace (Install Package powernowd and you will have dynamic CPU speed.) 5) Xserver-xfree86 does not yet support the Intel 915 chipset, you need to set it up for VESA support with the modes listed above. The next release of stable will, with it's use of the x.org window system. If you must have I915 drivers you could experiment with introducing the x.org window system into this system. 6) Intel 2200 B/G. Load the ipw2200-source package, the kernel-headers-2.6 package, the build-essential, the wireless-tools and module-assistant packages. From Root type in "module-assistant" and choose each item in the presented menu in order. When you get to the "select interesting package" screen choose Intel 2200 B/G support. Module-assistant will then compile and install the drivers for you. It will also direct you to fetch the correct firmware from a sourceforge website. Get the firmware, untar it and drop it into the indicated directory and you can use the IPW2200BG on interface eth1. 7) Software modem. Go to Linuxant.com and fetch the cnxtinstall.run installer. Get online via ethernet and run this from root with a sh cnxtinstall.run and it will set up the drivers for the soft modem. My tests indicate that this modem actually performs like a 14400 modem so if you are exclusively a modem user, you may want to get a PCMCIA modem. [I set up ipmasq and dhcpd on my desktop computer, and I use my hardware modem through my desktop computer with a crossover cable.] I tried everything to get the sound card to work with the riptide drivers, but I could not get them to work (even under a seperate 2.4 kernel installation.) Enjoy your Debian Laptop! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
