Debian Etch on a Dell Latitude D620

By: Chad C. Walstrom ccw@umn.edu
Created: Thu, 20 Jul 2006
Last Updated: Thu, 20 Jul 2006

This page contains information on how I set up Debian GNU / Linux on a Dell Latitude D620, complete with successes and failures. The laptop was purchased so that I could have something a little more reliable and quicker than my current Thinkpad T30 for an upcoming SANS training course here in Minneapolis, MN. The little Thinkpad worked well enough, but it's had its share of problems. In any case, the Dell D620 arrived early this week. It's a nice little machine in the average weight-class; certainly luggable.

Keeping Windows Around

Because the laptop would first be used for a Windows security training course, I needed to make sure I had a working Windows installation. Luck for me, it came with one. All it needed were some updates from the Microsoft site, a disk defrag, and an Automated System Recovery backup image.

After completing the pain of updating and configuring windows, it was time to slice out some disk space for Linux. The Linux SystemRescueCD came to, well, the rescue! I used QTParted to resize the NTFS partition on the 100GB SATA, and noticed that two more partitions existed. The 40MB partition at the beginning of the disk was marked as a FAT 16 partition, which Linux later recognized as a special Dell partition. It's probable that this partition houses the Dell Diagnostics software.

The second one partition, a 10MB slice at the end of the disk, was unmarked. I suspected that it was Dell specific, but wasn't certain. I should have looked more closely at it, perhaps dumping the first few sectors to see if there was any data on it. In fact, I should have used qtparted or partimage to make and save images of these partitions for future use/restore. As it turns out, the installation went well anyway. I'll probably steal the partition from my boss' identical laptop.

(The Windows Disk Manager reported the 40MB partition as EISA Configuration -- weird.)

Welcome, Debian

After resizing the partition, I rebooted to Windows XP and let chkdisk do its thing, then rebooted again on to the Debian installation disk, the daily netinstall snapshot for Etch.

  1. Initial boot problem: Didn't recognize the CD. (Resolved: use libata.enable_atapi=1 in kernel boot parameters)
  2. New installgui worked beautifully
  3. Wireless doesn't work (Resolution: need to install driver manually)
  4. Xorg in VESA mode (Resolution: need nVidia proprietary driver)

Hiding Linux from Windows

One thing I did note when booting back in to windows is that it viewed my LVM partition as a "Healthy" filesystem, but didn't really recognize it other than being blank. The boot partition and swap partition also showed up without labels. Rather than confusing Windows beyond repair, or allowing it to damage my Linux installation, it is probably a good idea to hide these partitions from the system via the GRUB configuration.

# Configuration to be added

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