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Just thought I'd drop a note about a very successful, though
not-so-recent, laptop installation to a Dell Inspiron 2100.  I've
meant to do this for a while, and it may be too late as Dell appears
to have discontinued it. Which is a pity, as I'm pleased with
it.

The 2100 is a somewhat ultralite (3.5 pounds/2 kg; 1" thick) with
a PIII 700MHz.  I have the default configuration comes with 128MB
of RAM and a 10GBF harddrive, but with the bigger battery.  There
is a docking station, though I've never seen one. Having a good
backpack, I made my own case out of foam-wrapping and duct tape :-)
A brief summary of its features (I've attached 1.5.3_ALPHA dmesg output):

  - 12" LCD (1024x768: 106dpi x 106dpi)
  - ATI 3D Rage Mobility with 4MB of memory
  - built-in ethernet (10/100), and Winmodem (an LTMODEM),
  - two-button synaptics touchpad81
  - built-in ethernet (10/100), and Winmodem (an LTMODEM :-(), 
    Cirrus Logic CS4281 CrystalClear Audioe>
  - external ports: 
     - one USB port
     - PS/2 mouse/keyboard (tried with a keyboard, never a mouse)
     - 15-pin VGA (works fine)
     - headphone/stereo jack + a tinny little speaker
     - ATAPI connector for the modular devices (mine came
       with a CDROM and 1.44MB floppy)
     - microphone jack (+ internal mic)
     - parallel port; there are serial ports, but no ports on the 'top
     - one thin CardBus slot (is this Type II?)8

One of the best things about this laptop is that everything just
worked with NetBSD 1.5.1 (though read on for some 1.5.2 stuff).  In
fact, the biggest difficulty I've encountered was figuring out how
to shrinking the WindowsME installation (forced upon me) to free
up space for NetBSD; I ended up having to use PartitionMagic. 

The 12" screen may sound small, but I find it perfect. Since I rarely
used more than 1024x768, and it's so crisp, I've never bothered to
hook it up to an external monitor, even though we have several spare
19" monitors in my lab. The stereo jack has more noise than I would
have expected, but it's acceptable.

It suspends/resumes repeatedly with no problems (though I've never
tried it with any PCMCIA cards). Note that this is battery-backed;
see just below for suspend-to-disk woe. I get about 3 hours on a
full charge, having changed to ctwm from Enlightenment (E checks
the disk every twenty seconds for some reason). As I've complained
in an earlier e-mail, the mouse cursor disappears in X on resume,
but switching VTs fixes that, and I've now incorporated an automated
switcher into my apm scripts along the lines suggested in the e-mails.

A few significant caveats:

  - I've never tried its PCMCIA/CardBus support.
  - I've only tried using the full-suspend (to hard-disk) once,
    which failed: this was initiated by the BIOS as the battery was low,
    and it ran out of power during the write.  I haven't been able
    to try it otherwise as our APM stuff doesn't seem to be able to
    initiate a suspend-to-disk.
  - Some of the `special' keys don't work, like to raise or loweri
    the volume (Fn-F5 and -F6), or to eject the CD-ROM. I assume@
    these require ACPI support, and I don't miss them anyways.te?
  - I'm not sure what this means in the dmesg:

	WARNING: can't reserve area for I/O APIC.
	 Physical memory end: 0x07fed000
	 PCI memory mapped I/O space start: 0x08000000

Unfortunately my experience with 1.5.2 hasn't been quite as smooth
as with 1.5.1.  I've had it unexplicably hang three times or so (doesn't
respond to pings), these occurred after the machine had been idle
for a bit.  I've never been able to determine a reason for it:
there are no crash dumps, nothing in /var/log/messages, etc.  The
only solution was to power-down and power-up. I've also suffered
strange black-outs in X on resume where the screen refuses to
redraw. I can switch back and forth to a text VT with no problem,
but X never recovers, except by killing the server. Though this
never happened with 1.5.1, it might have something to do with the
automated-VT switching on resume I setup recently; perhaps I should
put a sleep in there...  I'm currently trying a 1.5.3_ALPHA kernel
to see if that makes a difference.

I should emphasize that these are only minor problems: everything 
in general works like a charm!

The only desirable features I'd like to see in NetBSD are:
  - support for hot-swapping the external CD-ROM or floppy; these
    are just ATAPI devices. I've seen some others asking about this
    on some lists.
  - support for LTMODEMs... I'm hoping to look at this, should I get
    some time.

So kudos guys and thanks for your hard work. I'm very pleased.

-- 
"Source code in files. How quaint." - Kent Beck
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

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NetBSD 1.5.3_ALPHA (GENERIC_LAPTOP) #0: Fri Jan 25 01:20:47 CET 2002
    tron@colwyn.zhadum.de:/src/NetBSD-1.5/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC_LAPTOP
cpu0: Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) (686-class), 697.00 MHz
total memory = 127 MB
avail memory = 114 MB
using 1658 buffers containing 6632 KB of memory
BIOS32 rev. 0 found at 0xfd7a0
PCI BIOS rev. 2.1 found at 0xfd9c5
pcibios: config mechanism [1][x], special cycles [x][x], last bus 1
PCI IRQ Routing Table rev. 1.0 found at 0xfdf40, size 160 bytes (8 entries)
PCI Interrupt Router at 000:07:0 (Intel 82371FB PCI-to-ISA Bridge (PIIX))
------------------------------------------
  device vendor product pin PIRQ IRQ stage
------------------------------------------
000:07:2 0x8086 0x7112   D  0x03  11  0    already assigned
000:08:0 0x1013 0x6005   A  0x01  10  0    already assigned
000:10:0 0x104c 0xac50   A  0x00  10  0    already assigned
000:13:0 0x10b7 0x9200   A  0x00  10  0    already assigned
000:16:0 0x11c1 0x0448   A  0x02   3  0    already assigned
001:00:0 0x1002 0x4c4d   A  0x00  10  0    already assigned
------------------------------------------
PCI bridge 0: primary 0, secondary 1, subordinate 1
PCI bridge 1: primary 0, secondary 2, subordinate 2
PCI bus #2 is the last bus
[System BIOS Setting]-----------------------
  device vendor product
  register space address    size
--------------------------------------------
000:00:0 0x8086 0x7190 
	10h mem  0xf8000000 0x04000000
		[OK]
000:01:0 0x8086 0x7191 
		[OK]
000:07:0 0x8086 0x7110 
		[OK]
000:07:1 0x8086 0x7111 
	20h port 0x0000fcd0 0x00000010
		[OK]
000:07:2 0x8086 0x7112 
	20h port 0x0000fce0 0x00000020
		[OK]
000:07:3 0x8086 0x7113 
		[OK]
000:08:0 0x1013 0x6005 
	10h mem  0xfedef000 0x00001000
	14h mem  0xfedf0000 0x00010000
		[OK]
000:10:0 0x104c 0xac50 
	10h mem  0x00000000 0x00001000
		[NG]
000:13:0 0x10b7 0x9200 
	10h port 0x0000fc00 0x00000080
	14h mem  0xfededc00 0x00000080
		[OK]
000:16:0 0x11c1 0x0448 
	10h mem  0xfeded800 0x00000100
	14h port 0x0000fcc8 0x00000008
	18h port 0x0000f800 0x00000100
		[OK]
001:00:0 0x1002 0x4c4d 
	10h mem  0xfd000000 0x01000000
	14h port 0x0000e800 0x00000100
	18h mem  0xfecfe000 0x00001000
		[OK]
--------------------------[  1 devices bogus]
WARNING: can't reserve area for I/O APIC.
 Physical memory end: 0x07fed000
 PCI memory mapped I/O space start: 0x08000000
[PCIBIOS fixup stage]-----------------------
  device vendor product
  register space address    size
--------------------------------------------
000:00:0 0x8086 0x7190 
	10h mem  0xf8000000 0x04000000
		[OK]
000:01:0 0x8086 0x7191 
		[OK]
000:07:0 0x8086 0x7110 
		[OK]
000:07:1 0x8086 0x7111 
	20h port 0x0000fcd0 0x00000010
		[OK]
000:07:2 0x8086 0x7112 
	20h port 0x0000fce0 0x00000020
		[OK]
000:07:3 0x8086 0x7113 
		[OK]
000:08:0 0x1013 0x6005 
	10h mem  0xfedef000 0x00001000
	14h mem  0xfedf0000 0x00010000
		[OK]
000:10:0 0x104c 0xac50 
	10h mem  0x08000000 0x00001000
		[OK]
000:13:0 0x10b7 0x9200 
	10h port 0x0000fc00 0x00000080
	14h mem  0xfededc00 0x00000080
		[OK]
000:16:0 0x11c1 0x0448 
	10h mem  0xfeded800 0x00000100
	14h port 0x0000fcc8 0x00000008
	18h port 0x0000f800 0x00000100
		[OK]
--------------------------[  0 devices bogus]
mainbus0 (root)
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1
pci0: i/o space, memory space enabled
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0
pchb0: Intel 82443BX Host Bridge/Controller (rev. 0x03)
ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0: Intel 82443BX AGP Interface (rev. 0x03)
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
pci1: i/o space, memory space enabled
vga1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0: ATI Technologies Mach64 LM (rev. 0x64)
wsdisplay0 at vga1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
pcib0 at pci0 dev 7 function 0
pcib0: Intel 82371AB PCI-to-ISA Bridge (PIIX4) (rev. 0x02)
pciide0 at pci0 dev 7 function 1: Intel 82371AB IDE controller (PIIX4) (rev. 0x01)
pciide0: bus-master DMA support present
pciide0: primary channel wired to compatibility mode
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <IBM-DJSA-210>
wd0: drive supports 16-sector pio transfers, lba addressing
wd0: 9590 MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 19640880 sectors
wd0: 32-bit data port
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 4
pciide0: primary channel interrupting at irq 14
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (using DMA data transfers)
pciide0: secondary channel wired to compatibility mode
pciide0: disabling secondary channel (no drives)
uhci0 at pci0 dev 7 function 2: Intel 82371AB USB Host Controller (PIIX4) (rev. 0x01)
uhci0: interrupting at irq 11
usb0 at uhci0: USB revision 1.0
uhub0 at usb0
uhub0: Intel UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
Intel 82371AB Power Management Controller (PIIX4) (miscellaneous bridge, revision 0x03) at pci0 dev 7 function 3 not configured
clct0 at pci0 dev 8 function 0: Cirrus Logic CS4281 CrystalClear Audio Interface (rev. 0x01)
clct0: interrupting at irq 10
clct0: CRY20 codec; headphone, 20 bit DAC, 18 bit ADC, Spatializer 3D
audio0 at clct0: full duplex, independent
cbb0 at pci0 dev 10 function 0: Texas Instruments product 0xac50 (rev. 0x01)
ex0 at pci0 dev 13 function 0: 3Com 3c905C-TX 10/100 Ethernet with mngmt (rev. 0x78)
ex0: interrupting at irq 10
ex0: MAC address 00:b0:d0:bf:ab:c1
ukphy0 at ex0 phy 24: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
ukphy0: OUI 0x001018, model 0x0017, rev. 7
ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
AT&T Microelectronics LTMODEM (miscellaneous communications, revision 0x01) at pci0 dev 16 function 0 not configured
isa0 at pcib0
com0 at isa0 port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4: ns16550a, working fifo
pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60-0x64
pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
pckbc0: using irq 1 for kbd slot
wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard, using wsdisplay0
pms0 at pckbc0 (aux slot)
pckbc0: using irq 12 for aux slot
wsmouse0 at pms0 mux 0
lpt0 at isa0 port 0x378-0x37b irq 7
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
midi0 at pcppi0: PC speaker
sysbeep0 at pcppi0
isapnp0 at isa0 port 0x279: ISA Plug 'n Play device support
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0-0xff: using exception 16
fdc0 at isa0 port 0x3f0-0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2
isapnp0: no ISA Plug 'n Play devices found
cbb0: interrupting at irq 10
cbb0: cacheline 0x8 lattimer 0x20
cbb0: bhlc 0x24008 lscp 0x20020200
cardslot0 at cbb0 slot 0 flags 0
cardbus0 at cardslot0: bus 2 device 0 cacheline 0x8, lattimer 0x20
pcmcia0 at cardslot0
apm0 at mainbus0: Power Management spec V1.2
biomask ef6d netmask ef6d ttymask ffef
boot device: wd0
root on wd0a dumps on wd0b
root file system type: ffs
IP Filter: v3.4.9 initialized.  Default = pass all, Logging = enabled
wsdisplay0: screen 1 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsdisplay0: screen 2 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsdisplay0: screen 3 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsdisplay0: screen 4 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsmux1: connecting to wsdisplay0

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