Dual Boot Inspiron 600m

If you have not yet bought your computer, you can save yourself some trouble by making sure the one you buy comes with a wireless card supported by Fedora. My computer came with an Intel Pro 2200 wireless card which is NOT supported. I only discovered this after I got Fedora running. As you can see from the end of this document, it is possible to get the the Intel Pro 2200 running, but it takes some doing.

1. Download the iso images from http://fedora.redhat.com
2. Burn the iso images to CD. You can find instructions for burning iso images in Linux here.
3. Defragment Drive C using the Windows Disk Defragmenter.
4. Create a new partition on the hard drive to hold Fedora. I used BootItNG. This is a shareware program. You can download a fully functional 30-day trial version. I found these two sites useful: http://members.shaw.ca/bootitng and http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/ntfs.html. Here's how I did it:
   • Create the bootable floppy as described in the two sites above.
   • Boot that floppy.
   • When the BootItNG setup screen appears, do NOT install it to the hard drive. Hit CANCEL. That puts you in Maintenance Mode. Hit OK.
   • Select Partition Work.
   • Select the hard drive you want to work on.
   • Select the partition to resize. After you do this, the program will do some error checking that can take a while.
   • When the error checking is over, enter the new partition size.
   • Reboot the computer with the floppy out and make sure Windows is working correctly still.
5. Now you can start installing Fedora. Insert Fedora Core 3 Disk 1 and reboot your computer from the CD. To boot from a CD on a one time basis on a Dell, enter F12 as soon as you see the Dell logo.
   • The installation program takes you through several steps. The only place I had trouble was in the partitioning section. I tried to use Automatic Partitioning but received an error. Instead, I used Manual Partitioning. Then following instructions given here, I created a 100mb /boot partition, a 1 gig swap partition (because I have 512mb of RAM), and allocated the rest of my free space to the / (root) partition. To do this, just click on the free space you created using BootItNG and click the New button in Disk Druid.
6. To get my touch pad to work with the 2.6.11 kernel I had to follow the ALPS touchpad instructions given here.
7. Get your wireless card working. Note the Intel Pro 2200 now seems to be supported in the new kernels, so you can ignore the following. If you're lucky, you don't have to deal with this. Here's how I got my Intel Pro 2200 working. First, I read about a driver under development here. I then read this page and this page. Here's what I actually did:
   • Download the driver from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/. I downloaded ipw2200-0.19.tgz.
   • Download the firmware from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/. I downloaded the one for the newest version.
   • Unarchive the driver:
     tar xzvf ipw2200-0.19.tgz
   • cd to the ipw2200-0.19 directory and as root enter:
     make install
   • Copy the firmware you downloaded to /lib/firmware. This is different from the directory mentioned in the installation instructions.
   • Unpack the firmware:
     tar xzvf ipw2200-fw-2.2.tgz
   • Reboot. When the new hardware detection window comes up choose DHCP or set an IP address for the machine.
   • Finally, configure the card using the System Settings -> Network utility. See http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc2-ipw2200.shtml for more.

Extras

1. Getting xmms to play mp3s. Checkout this page and this page.