Dell Studio 1737

Introduction
This page contains some information for Dell Studio 17 users. I've been running one of these for some months now as ~amd64 (ie latest stuff, 64 bit) and it works really well. I use KDE pretty much exclusively on it. Apart from the dreadful speakers, its a great laptop.

You should note that at the time of writing (16 Jun 2010), I am running pretty bleeding edge. Xorg 1.8, KDE 4.4.3 etc.

Rather than just listing hardware, I provide direct copies of configuration files which is probably more useful.

make.conf - CFLAGS etc
This shows the relevant parts of my /etc/make.conf. Note that you may not want ~amd64 and will use amd64 instead - that's your choice. I picked my CLAGS by looking at /proc/cpuinfo and the Gentoo safe CFLAGS page.

Kernel config
This is the kernel config I am using now - 2.2.34. It will include a lot of drivers and modules that might be unnecessary for your needs but it will get pretty much everything you need working.

If you use my config yourself then please note that I use ext{2,3,4} filesystems exclusively. If you want your machine to boot and you use something else then add support for it!

This includes:
 * Dell keys - eg the volume adjusters
 * WiFi - Intel iwlagn
 * NIC - Broadcom Tigon - tg3
 * Webcam - UVC
 * Video - Radeon with kernel mode setting KMS
 * Bluetooth - I can tether my laptop via my Nokia phone OK
 * Power management - suspend/resume to RAM is working nicely - I haven't tried hibernate yet.

I have not setup irda as such so you are on your own there, but I think I've included the modules.

Note these:
 * CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="radeon/R600_rlc.bin iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode"
 * CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR="/lib/firmware"

I found in the past that building the firmware directly into the kernel for video and WiFi greatly improved things. KMS for the radeon did not really work at all and WiFi took ages to authenticate via wpa_supplicant beforehand.

To get the firmware:

and follow the radeon guide.

If you just want to get all the hardware working then copy my .config into /usr/src/linux (symlink to your kernel code) and run:

The above assumes that you have installed genkernel and want to set some options yourself. At the time of writing this is vanilla-sources-2.6.34.

fstab and Grub
I followed the Gentoo installation guide to get this disc layout:

Here is my grub.conf. Please amend to suit your setup.

xorg.conf
I don't have one! For the first time that I can remember (~13 years of Linux experience), I have been able to not worry about it. Just delete the thing and enjoy the fruits of a lot of hard work by the Xorg crew and the kernel devs.

USE flags
If you are a KDE user and want a lot of functionality then here are my USE flags. These have built over some time and I work in IT so they may be a bit excessive for your needs. On the otherhand I have not looked too deeply into the subject recently so I have probably missed a few. Also note that I have disabled some flags (notably gtk) so please check them out before use. Have a look into something like ufed to manage them.