During the last disaster, I lost the root partition, while the good news is the irresponsible mkstage4.sh backup the /etc that saves a huge amount of time for me to emerge world.

This post would summarize the efforts for my record and for your convenience. This HOWTO is originally posted in the official forum three years ago, and I once tried to update it in my previous post as well. Since then, some devices get supported, some software packages are obsolete, Life runs fast. Read the rest of this entry »

After several months’ waiting, kernel 2.6.20 with suspend2 patch finally come into x86 branch. The upgrade is quite smooth except some bumps.

According to the experience of building the poor man’s wireless network, some exotic errors may happen if the .config is copied direct from kernel 2.6.18, so I went though all the configuration using make menuconfig. Read the rest of this entry »

It is quite sad to announce that I am obliged to stop maintaining Gentoo on 700m, since my Dell Inspiron 700m is dead. It just lost the power without any smoke, smell, and I could not power it on any more. It is highly probable the power module of the motherboard is burned.

• The price to replace the out-of-warranty motherboard is: $300.

• 3rd party service varies from $99 - $198 + H.S, depends on how many MOSFETs needs to replace.

It is a pity that I failed to replace the deficient motherboard during the warranty period. The technician of Dell just simply ignored my requests since most of the complaints are quite trivial, and all the symptoms are not easy to reproduce. And Dell’s attitude makes things ever worse.

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 …