Linux on a Dell Dimension 9150

02 feb 2006

Linux on a Dell Dimension 9150

My new computer is a Dell Dimension 9150, which casually happened to arrive at Christmas. After a month or so of use I can tell that there are no problems with Linux at all. I have installed Gentoo Linux, of course ;-)

Technical specs:

Pentium D 820 @ 2.8 GHz
2GB RAM
HS SATA 250GB
Ati Radeon X600
On-board Intel GB Lan

1. make.conf
This is a special Gentoo file, which sets the architecture, compiler options, use flags and such. Nocona is the architecture for Pentium D and Xeon. If you have less than 4GB of ram, then x86 is recommended. Otherwise, I have been told amd64 is better, because it can handle the memory adresses beyond 4GB.

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=nocona -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://pandemonium.tiscali.de/pub/gentoo/ http://gentoo.ngi.it"
USE="svg dvdr hal curl gstreamer xine debug doc X qt kde cups samba ssl acpi alsa 
artswrappersuid oss encode jpeg divx xvid cdr dvd java japper apache2 imlib php 
sql subversion wxgtk win32codecs dvd -gtk -gnome -bindist -sis -rage128
-matrox -gamma -i8x0"
FEATURES="nostrip"
LINGUAS="en it"

Delete the "debug" flag and the FEATURES="nostrip" if you don't care about debug symbols. This will render the executables (much) shorter, but your backtraces in bug reports will be useless.
CFLAGS are rather conservative. I have not experimented with that.

2. xorg.conf
to configure X and 3D acceleration. Gentoo right now suffers a bug with ati-drivers which renders the acceleration useles, but I hope they'll resolve it shortly.
Dowload: xorg.conf

3. kernel configuration
Name it .config and put it in the kernel base directory. This is in particular for linux-2.6.15-gentoo-r1, but any 2.6.15 should be OK, and even newer or older ones should accept it, provided it's a 2.6 tree.
config-linux-2.6.15-gentoo-r1

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Linux on a Dell Dimension 9150

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