Hi Ben,
I purchased an Inspiron 8200 in January, 2003. 2GHz P4M, 640 M ram ATI radeon 9000 mobility. I have run Redhat 7.0, 8.0 and currently slackware 9.1.
In general, I have had excellent performance from the machine under both flavors of linux. However, there are some points to note:
1. Dell laptops come partitioned in 2 partitions: 1 for windows root and a small (60M or so) partition at the beginning of the disk for the self-check software. Whilst this partition is not *strictly* needed, I choose to keep it.
2. If you choose an ATI graphics card, the latest Xfree will support 2D acceleration standard, but for 3D you have the choice of the closed source ATI driver, the open source DRI project, or the commercial Xi graphics. Be sure that your choice is supported somewhere. As far as I know, Nvidia support works fine using their drivers.
3. The modem in mine is a win-modem. There are various open source drivers in states of non-opeation, so I bought the drivers from linuxant.com. Make sure you find out what your modem chipset is before downloading.
4. It will probably be nessecary to download (or write) a script to control the fans. Inspirons usually run pretty hot (mine gets up to 70 deg. C during intensive computation), and as far as I know, there is no native control for the fans.
5. I've yet to find a suspend/sleep power management that works. The computer goes to sleep fine, but waking up it usually hangs. Personally, I havent looked that hard, because I use my laptop as a desktop replacement, so it generally stays put.
There is a community of linux/inspiron users out there who have documented their efforts , so if you do get stuck there is pleanty support in the community. There is also much linux chat on the dell knowlege base.
Hope that helps. Feel free to ask for specifics.
Pete
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
