Experiments with Inspiron 1520

I have got my new green Inspiron 1520 (yes, now DELL has started adding color to life!). I love the new Vista with all its eyecandy and just that. But I would prefer a linux to work. So started with partitioning. Sadly my Acronis partition expert boot CD could not recognise the hard disk :( Hey bu the vista has partition resizer built in to it....! Now managed to resize my harddisk.

Strangely the resize could only be done from 130 to 90GB freeing 40Gb. I was looking forward to try out DELL restore functionality, I used this situation & restored laptop to factory status with the DELL restore feature, which now uses VISTA's Imagex (I beleive now we can copy & move the image to different partion , though I am not too sure, need to check with goodells Dan). Once re-stored to factory state, I can again shrink by another 50 Gb to get total 90Gb free. I partitioned it into 10Gb linux & 512Mb swap & 5Gb FAT, keeping rest free.

Now to try out some linux flavours... Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop CD wont boot (goes to some command prompt, which is not linux). Later I learnt I need to use the alternate CD, that install from command line, on I1520. Will try this later.

Next was MEPIS 6.5, which I could boot in to GUI, but in VESA mode. I could install it to hard disk as well. I was now looking to install Nvidia driver for my Nvidia 8600M GT GPU. I downloaded the latest Linux driver from nvidia site & Kernel headers from synaptic. From the console (ctrl-alt-F1), killed GUI with init 3. and started the nividia installer. It went thru fine and I could re-start the GUI with Nvidia drivers. I could see the green nvidia logo as the X started. Tried out beryl (built in in MPIS), was coming up witout window borders. Was fixed once the color depth was set to 24bits.

Now to enable both cores, I had to download the SMP kernal & install nvidia driver for that kernel. But this SMP kernel has disabled my sound! Still have to check on that.

For booting, I decided to keep Vista boot loader and load MEPIS from it. I had done this from XP, but Vista uses a different boot loader. Vista has BCDEdit to edit boot entries, which is a comand line tool. There is also a GUI for this, EasyBCD. This is a cool utility, it also takes the image of the first sector of the linux partition which is required for boot. However with my disk, it was not able to identify correct parttion of linux and I had to resort to BCDEdit. Now I can boot MEPIS from Vista boot loader.

Planning to install Ubuntu next, planning to install orace on that. Planning to follow instrutions from Dizwell's site. Will update here on that. Also planning to try compiz-fusion on that. Looks pretty fancy with gears & meditaranian plugins...