Finally, Linux Worked on Dell Inspiron 2600

I haven’t used my fairly old Dell Inspiron 2600, which I bought in the sum­mer of 2002, for quite some time, and had been think­ing to give it to my mother, but first I wanted to install and setup Linux, so that I wouldn’t have to fix some­thing in the sys­tem all the time, and deal with vir­uses, tro­jans, poorly installed pro­gramms etc. How­ever, whilst I’ve attemp­ted to install pen­guinista OS sev­eral times over past couple of years (tried Ubuntu/Xubuntu, SUSE and Fedora), I’d con­stantly reached a dead­lock, because X-server in no way wanted to cooper­ate with on-board Intel graph­ics pro­cessor (notori­ous for that).

Recently I was search­ing for new inform­a­tion on the issue on Ubuntu for­ums, which I had been doing reg­u­larly once every sev­eral months, and ran across the topic which stated that Xubuntu 8.10 works with an external mon­itor (through VGA–out­put), but doesn’t want to work with internal LCD. I don’t recall I’ve attemp­ted that before, so, out of sci­entific interest, I had tried dif­fer­ent Ubuntu ver­sions with an external monitor.

Turned out that Ubuntu and Xubuntu 7.04 didn’t work even so, and Ubuntu 8.10 was being corked at the known prob­lem with on-board Intel chip­set while using compiz (inter­face visual effects), which I’d encountered couple weeks back. I couldn’t find CDs with 8.04, but since the “Intel + compiz” issue didn’t extend on that ver­sion, I sus­pect it could also work with an external mon­itor. Out of what I had only Xubuntu 8.10 worked through VGA-output from the begin­ning and without prob­lems, so I con­cen­trated on attempts to make Xubuntu friends with an internal LCD. More over, I did want to use Xfce as graphic envir­on­ment less demand­ing to the system.

Solu­tion

Research­ing the ques­tion, I’ve found much inform­a­tion about com­plex adjust­ments to /etc/X11/xorg.conf con­fig­ur­a­tion file, and even about neces­sity to degrade laptop’s BIOS to ver­sion 8. I, finally, was able to force X.org to show itself on an internal mon­itor (even using latest, 11^th ver­sion of BIOS), and then, using sci­entific trial-and-error method (test­ing dif­fer­ent com­bin­a­tions and com­ment­ing out lines that weren’t needed in the con­fig­ur­a­tion file), I determ­ined three min­imal con­di­tions for it to work:

• Dir­ect indic­a­tion of graph­ics driver (Driver "intel") in spite of X.org’s built-in means of auto­matic detec­tion that are new to Ubuntu. It’s mport­ant to use exactly the new uni­ver­sal “intel” driver, but not the old “i810”.
• Dir­ect indic­a­tion for X.org to use LVDS–out­put (internal con­nec­tion to LCD): Option "monitor-LVDS" "Configured Monitor".
• Indic­a­tion to use pre­ferred res­ol­u­tion: (Option "PreferredMode" "1024x768").

Thus, with min­imal changes to xorg.conf, I was able to make Xubuntu 8.10 and internal LCD-monitor under­stand one another. That solves my prob­lems, but doesn’t allow, how­ever, to use internal and external mon­it­ors at the same time (although I don’t think it is so import­ant on such a weak machine), for instance. There are pos­sibly other lim­it­a­tions. Quite prob­able that degrad­ing BIOS to 8^th ver­sion or more com­plex set­tings in xorg.conf will allow use of “i810” driver, to work with two mon­it­ors and so on, but this solu­tion serves my goal, and the pur­pose of this article.

So, the full vari­ant of the xorg.conf con­fig­ur­a­tion file code with min­imal adjust­ments to default set­tings fresh after sys­tem install (changes highlighted):

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Driver		"intel"
	Option		"monitor-LVDS" "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
	Option		"PreferredMode" "1024x768"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Monitor		"Configured Monitor"
	Device		"Configured Video Device"
EndSection