Dualboot Gentoo + Windows XP On A Dell Inspiron E1505
August 13th, 2006 - By: Alex Bailey
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Well I finally got both operating systems successfully configured. Windows XP was obviously a breeze to install, and I did that first. Installed gentoo last with minimal issues. Originally I installed XP on sda1 and moved it to sda4 so I needed to repair boot.ini which was easy. The steps to repair a missing or corrupt boot.ini can be found at About.com. Most of Dell's parts are fairly compatible with Linux. The wireless card which I regret not upgrading requires ndiswrapper to work properly, but since I don't have wifi I didn't bother with it. The kernel drivers for the sound card are a little buggy, the sound skips sometimes with Xgl. For instructions on how to configure alsa/sound see the Gentoo handbook. After sound was configured it didn't work with Firefox and flash animations. After googleing a little I found this solution. Since it's a laptop the screen should shut off when you close the lid. It should also have some power saving techniques such as hibernate and sleep. First you'll need to enable acpi in the kernel and recompile. Emerge it, and add it startup. I enabled all the acpi sub categories..video..battery etc. This should get your battery meter to work. In /etc/acpi you can find scripts to configure the screen to shut off when you close the lid. For more details on this script see this link. Gentoo wiki has more details on acpi. I needed to add a hack to the .sh file to get the screen to shut off properly. "xset dpms force off && sleep 5" should work. You'll need to emerge some things before that command works however. You'll need to configure the ATI drivers to get proper resolutions. Just emerge ati-drviers. You might want to pick up the extra utils with that as well. emerge -s ati to see what is avalible. Find the aticonfig binary path and run it with the --initial flag, and it _should_ work. I setup Xgl which was nearly impossible, but it looks elite. Here is the Gentoo manual to install and configure Xgl. Remember the Gentoo handbook is your bible.
Here are some extras you can download:
- xorg.conf - Xorg configuration file.
- .config - Kernel's configuration file.
- make.conf - /etc/make.conf Gentoo's flags for compiling things.
- compile.sh - Quick bash script to recompile your kernel if you are constantly trying new things like me.
If you want to make your box look like Vista like I choose to do you'll need:
You will also need to set Aero as your theme once you install compiz and Xgl. Here is the final product of what my Gentoo Linux desktop looks like.
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