This HOWTO summarize the efforts on Gentoo official forum.

This HOWTO is provided “AS IS” without any express or implied warranty. You can redistribute it under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

It is highly inspired by HARDWARE Gentoo Acer Travelmate 803LCi Manual

Technical specification of Dell 700m:

• Processors : Pentium M processors 725 (1.60GHz, 2MB Cache, 400MHz FSB)
• Chipset: Intel 855GME
• Displays: 12.1-inch Wide Screen crystal clear TFT XGA active-matrix display (1280 x 800 resolution)
• Graphics Card: Intel Extreme Graphics up to 64 MB shared memory
• Hard Drive: 30 GB3 Ultra ATA hard drive
• Optical Drive: 8x DVD
• Sound Card: Integrated stereo sound
• Modems: Internal 56K3 capable v.92 Fax modem
• Network Interface: Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
• Wireless Networking: Dell 1350 TruMobile (BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller)
• I/O Ports : Integrated IEEE 1394, 2 USB 2.0, Audio jacks, 15-pin monitor connector, S-Video/TV Out. PCMCIA slot.

Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82852/82855 GM/GME/PM/GMV Processor to I/O Controller (rev 02)
System peripheral: Intel Corp. 82852/82855 GM/GME/PM/GMV Processor to I/O Controller (rev 02)
VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
Display controller: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 83)
ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DBM (ICH4-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DBM (ICH4-M) IDE Controller (rev 03)
SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC’97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC’97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI7420 CardBus Controller
FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCI7×20 1394a-2000 OHCI Two-Port PHY/Link-Layer Controller
Unknown mass storage controller: Texas Instruments PCI7420/PCI7620 Dual Socket CardBus and Smart Card Cont. w/ 1394a-2000 OHCI Two-Port PHY/Link-Layer Cont. an
Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)

I just follow this HOWTO to install the basic system, we would note 700m-specific configuration in the rest HOWTO.

CFLAGS grant the power to Gentoo users to customize the compiler flag for the specific architecture. For the bootstrap phase:

For GCC 3.4, this CFLAG configuration is used by many l33ts in the forum:

A more conservative CFLAG is

Don’t forget to set the LDFLAGS as well

After reviewing this benchmark result, I decide to use the JFS as the default file system for the sake of power-consuming. I’ve been using nitro-sources for almost one year flawlessly, this time, I would like to go back to gentoo-sources, currently 2.6.14-gentoo-r2

ACPI plays an essential role in power-saving, we would like to compile all ACPI features into the kernel:

And in the user land, remember to emerge acpid. It is easy to test whether acpi is running. Just close the lid, and check the system log:

SpeedStep is Intel’s DVFS approach, “conservative” governor dynamically scale the frequecncy according current work load, therefore, theoratically more power-saving than “ondemand” governor.

In the user land,

TO BE CONTINUED …