Next: Hardware List
Installing Debian on my new Dell Inspiron 5100 turned out to be one of the most frustrating things I've done in a while. It was quite difficult to get things going with no network to look up trouble spots and no way to get data off the laptop. However, I have (almost) everything operating now, and after a couple of months of use I'm quite happy with the machine. Hopefully this chronicle will be useful to other users of these hardwares.
If you have one of these machines or might in the future, and the subset of things you figure out is different from mine, I'd like to hear about it.
In the section headings below I've indicated which pieces gave me problems and very briefly what I did to solve them.
This document lives at http://web.utk.edu/~rmahurin/inspiron5100/ , where it was originally posted on 10 September 2003. As of 25 September 2003, printable versions are available online as well: the LaTeX source, and PostScript and PDF versions.