Well, the Dell Inspiron E1705 I bought showed up yesterday. Only showed up two weeks before they said it was. No compaints on this end. Pretty nice laptop, all in all.
I’ve already started to install Gentoo Linux on the E1705. Been taking notes what I do along the way. With all new hardware, this is going to take a little bit to get everything working. At this time, I have a somewhat stable system running. I’m still trying new things constantly, so I haven’t gotten to the point to write a good guide to follow as of yet.
For example, I have just gotten the Intel 3945ABG wireless network card to work, but to do so I’m using the mm-sources kernel tree (linux-2.6.16-rc6-mm2). I have gotten xorg to work using the vesa drivers, but I am having issues with the ati-drivers (not sure if they will even work at this point). I think I might stick with this kernel though since it did end up having a lot of nice things added, card reader support and a scheduler for multi-core systems. I think by the end of this week I’ll have a nice guide up though. I’ll put the lspci output up now though.
There is also one more issue I might need to solve first. When trying to install my Windows XP Professional that I had got from school, I always get a blue screen of death during the installation. Something about the pci.sys is causing trouble. Still looking into that issue, but it was using a Windows XP Pro installation disk that did not have any service packs.
Hi, James.
I recently bought a HP Pavilion dv8000t and it cames with a SATA drive. I tried to install Suse linux but it didn’t recognized the SATA drive. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
CF
Not too sure what your issue might be,since I’ve never used Suse Linux (well, not in a long long time). I’ve have seen in the past where some distros will make the hard drives hda, hdb, … instead of sda. I can’t remember if Suse is one of those distros, so let me know. Just check to see if you have /dev/hda.
If you keep getting blue screen when install XP, try to used stream service pack two that include in the XP installation CD
Generally if PCI.SYS is failing you’ve got either a hardware issue or a core device that windows cant seem to configure. This could indicate and outdated copy of windows, although most devices have a compadability mode where they will function as an old device did. Good luck on the linux install on E1705, I’m thinking of trying something other than Gentoo on mine. . . Gentoo is giving me headaches. Tried to use Genkernel on LiveCD.
I too just got an E1705, went to do a clean install of Windows XP Pro and got the BSOD identifying pci.sys. I don’t think I have access to a Windows installer that includes the service packs. Did you figure out what to do?
anonymous is right. you have to have an install cd that has service pack 2 “slipstreamed” onto it so that the initial install already has sp2 applied or the machine will always bluescreen. Bart’s has some good instructions on how to make one if you cannot acquire one.
http://www.nu2.nu/bootablecd/
look forward to your results with linux.
cheers.
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