DELL LatitudeCPi266-D
Machine-Specification
The Latitude CPi 266 comes with a mobile Pentium II processor with a 440BX AGPset chip-set. The chip has 32KB internal cache and 512KB external pipeline-burst L2 cache. Memory is of EDO type and is expandable up to 128MB. Rumors says this module is removable which would give us the possibility to upgrade the processor in the future. My D266 was equipped with 64MB RAM and it can be upgraded to 128MB. The hard drive is a 4.0GB IBM DTCA-24090 UDMA (Ultra DMA, ATA-33) and the CD is a 20X from Sanyo. The unit comes with a 13.3 XGA TFT screen is powered by a 2MB NeoMagic 2160 (128XD) 64-bit with a 128-bit accelerator chip. It's capable of doing 1024x768 in 16-bit color with a 75Hz refresh rate. It also has two PC-card slots controlled by a Texas Instruments PCI 1131 controller. This supports Card Bus and Zoomed Video (only in slot 0, the upper one).
The left bay holds the main battery (2700mAh). The right bay can either accept a floppy drive or a CD-ROM or a second battery pack. Using a second battery will boost battery life up to around 7 hours! This is what I really like about this machine. Both batteries also has a charge indicator which you can press and see if it needs a charge. Charge time is around 1 hour when idle.
Dell ship the unit with a parallel cable to which you can connect the floppy drive. This makes it possible to use the floppy at the same time as the CD-ROM. You can connect/disconnect the drive at any time.
All documentation for the unit is stored on-line as Windows HELP-files (where can I find Linux .hlp viewers?).
Installing Linux (RedHat7.0)
RedHat7.0 uses as default the kernel 2.2.16-22, XFree86-4.0.1a and gcc-2.96 (the buggy one)
Graphics
No problems running XFree86-4.0.1, the older version XFree86-3.3.6 caused some flickering. I did configuration with Xconfigurator and did choose 1024x768 resolution with 2MB RAM and graphical login screen.
Networking
I'm using a no-name ne2000-compatible 10-MBit PCMCIA ethernet card without any problems.
Sound
The Latitude comes with a Crystal Semiconductor CS4237B audio controller. It has no WaveTable support, but Dell ships a copy of Yamaha SYG-50 with the machine to be used in Windows 95. SYG-50 is a software MIDI synth similar to the Soft/OSS drivers distributed in the 2.1.x kernels.
I just use the standard-driver shipped with kernel-2.2.16 running the Chip in "Soundblaster" compatibility mode. The following settings for the sound-chip in /etc/modules.conf runs well:
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### /etc/modules.conf ###
###
### sound-chip settings ###
###
alias sound-slot-0 sb
options sound dmabuf=1
alias midi opl3
options opl3 io=0x388
options sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=0 mpu_io=0x330
###
Advanced Power Management (APM)
With default-settings after installation the laptop does not come back from suspend *if* pcmcia has been activated, ie. its modules has been loaded. On RedHat7.0 the apmd daemon can be configured by the file: /etc/sysconfig/apmd to suspend the cardmanager and resume it after wake up. Set the variable to PCMCIARESTART="yes" . Because the X-display has problems to return from suspend mode, the variable CHANGEVT="7" can be used to tell the number of the virtual terminal your X-Server runs on.