Further Adventures of Fedora Core 3 Linux on an Inspiron 600m Laptop

The lack of suspend is probably my biggest disappointment. It takes an awful long time to cold boot a system into a running KDE session. For a system-on-the-go, you want to be able to open up your laptop and be running quickly. Without working suspend, you are stuck with a time-consuming cold boot.

I've not had any progress with getting standby-to-memory or suspend-to-dosk work. I'm not giving up, though. So far I've been working with the accelerated X driver loaded and frame buffer drivers for the text consoles. I'm going to try simplifying the video setup and see if I have any better lock.

Last time I was so caught up working on standby/suspend that I didn't have a chance to setup the touchpad. At the time, this didn't concern me, because I've done that before without too much difficulty. I was, unfortunately, in for some surprises here.

The touchpad works correctly in the default configuration. X recognizes it as a PS/2 mouse. You don't have access to any of the advanced touchpad features unless the synaptics driver loaded, but most people won't care about that.

I care about it because I want to use the pointing device left-handed. You can remap the buttons easily enough. The problem is that also remaps the touchpad tap. After remapping the mouse for left-handed, a touchpad tap now acts as mouse button 3 rather than mouse button 1.

Switching to the synaptics (X input device) driver should solve that problem. Then you can adjust the touchpad settings. Unfortunately, that's not working correctly on the 600m. I believe the problem may be that the touchpad is an ALPS device, which is closely (but not completely) compatible with the Synaptics. With the driver loaded I can adjust the TapButton1 setting, but X ignores it.

As far as configuring the modem: I gave it a quick shot but the configuration wizard didn't recognize it. I'm not that surprised, and I don't anticipate looking into it further.

I'm very disappointed by the problems with suspend/standby and the touchpad. It's too bad, because otherwise the laptop is very reliable and seems well suited to Linux.