Dell Inspiron 1525!

Yay!

Finally got a Dell Inspiron 1525, Ruby Red Color, No Windows. It came with a nice CD of FreeDOS that said “with sources” and said that the stuff inside was licensed under GPL. But bleh, a whole lot of Windows drivers along with it. Anyway, Linux 2.6.25 supported both the network card and the sound card (Linux 2.6.22 did not).

Well, I had an old image of Debian testing with a 2.6.22 kernel that Varun had given me. The installer did not detect my network card and I had to declare that I had no network card. I brought Linux 2.6.25 from my desktop in a thumb drive and installed it.

I had trouble figuring out how to start the network because I thought the problem was with the driver, while the problem was actually with the cable. I replaced the cable, did:

ifconfig eth0 inet up {IP Addr.} netmask {Subnet Mask} broadcast {Broadcast Addr.}
route add gw default {Default Gateway}

And added my DNS servers to /etc/resolv.conf and things started working beautifully. This helped me, because I didn’t know the correct usage of ifconfig.

Yet to test the webcam, WLAN and so on. But what I need for my basic usage is working.

I plan this to be my portable music player, KDE Development Device and communication device. So far, I’ve barely set up the minimum requirements on it (I started at about 11:00 PM and it’s been 6 hours so far) but I think I’ve done a fairly good job in setting up the KDE development environment this time. I added a small bit of code that changes my coloured prompt to indicate whether I’m in a build directory or source directory, and also the branch I’m working on into David Faure’s cd function.

Right now, I’m compiling kdebase and hope to have KStars ready for tomorrow’s Kavalur trip [What perfect timing!]