Don’t call me DOM

Friday, I got a new laptop, a Dell Latitude D600, to replace my Compac Evo N400c; using the new Debian installer for Sarge, it took less than 20 minutes to get a working environment, with Gnome 2.6 and most of the hardware functionalities working… Quite a big improvement since the last time I used the Debian installer!

The main piece that didn’t quite work as is, is the ACPI configuration; fortunately, other people than me have gone through this, and following these Dell D600 tips for Linux, I think I got the remaining bits working; a few notes to other Debian users with regard to the notes linked above:

1. as of today, Debian acpid won’t read configuration files with a . in them (see a related bug report), so rename the trap_all.conf and PBTN.conf files without their .conf extensions
2. the radeontool binary compiled in the process hardcodes the location of the lspci util at /sbin/lspci whereas Debian has it in /usr/bin/lspci; so either recompile it with the proper fix, or make a symbolic link from one to the other
3. the acpi_handler.pl file needs to be tweaked to be adapted to Debian, too; that’s mostly replacing /sbin/service by /etc/init.d/

As far as I can tell, now my laptop goes to suspend when the lid is closed and the AC power is off; and the screen goes blank when the lid is shut, whatever state the AC power is at.

See also my kernel configuration file, my XF86 configuration file (both shamelessly stolen from colleagues of mine), my modified version of acpi-handler.pl.

I hope that the weird disk noises that I heard this morning were just that, and not the sign of anything worse… Also, I still get to get the internal Wifi card to work, although the fact that my PCMCIA card works as is doesn’t really motivate me to make it work…