Bill Hudspeth wrote:

> I'd like to to talk to anyone who has successfully installed NetBSD on
> a Dell notebook, especially the Inspiron 5000e.

  NetBSD works nicely here, on an Inspiron 5000e.  There are a few
things you have to be careful about, however:

  - APM support is broken in the BIOS.  You either have to compile a
kernel
    without APM, or you have to upgrade your BIOS.  I downloaded the
BIOS
    available for the Compal 38W2 (which apparently is the OEM name for
the
    5000e) from http://software.tuxtops.com/ which seems to be working
fine
    (even automated suspend to disk works when the battery is too low).

  - When I activated the IR port, the USB controller suddenly got IRQ 7
    which conflicted with lpt0 (and got me a kernel panic).  This can be
    resolved by setting lpt0 to IRQ 5 in the BIOS and the NetBSD kernel.

  - Sound doesn't work yet.  I'm working on a Maestro 2e driver for
NetBSD,
    but unfortunately the beast isn't very well documented, so this may
be
    taking some time ...

  - You need XFree86-4.0.2.  I used the CVS version from a couple of
weeks
    ago, and it compiled and installed almost out of the box (I used the
    top level Makefile from NetBSD's xsrc distribution).

  Cheers
      ,
   Rene