Introduction

I bought a DELL Latitude D400 laptop on E-bay. The machine had 512MB Ram and a 20GB Hard drive. It came with Windows XP SP2 pre-installed. This machine has no internal CD and this unit did not come with an external CD. My aim was to make it dual boot Windows and openSUSE 10.3 linux.

Preparation

I wanted a bigger hard drive, so I bought a 160GB samsung 2.5" HD. As with most ex-corporate machines this one did not come with installation media for windows (just a sticker with a number). Not having an easy way of re-installing windows, I decided the best thing to do would be to image the drive. I used the trial version of Acronis migrate easy. First I put the 160GB in an external USB enclosure, then ran migrate easy. It very quickly and smoothly transferred the image to the new drive. I needed to use the manual settings because by default easy migrate expands the partition size to fill the new HD, but I wanted to leave space available for SUSE.

After imaging I put the new hard drive in according to these instructions from DELL.

Installing SUSE

As the machine is on the low spec side of things, I opted to install the gnome version of openSUSE 10.3 which runs a bit lighter than KDE. After downloading and burning the images needed onto CD, I borrowed an external USB CD player and loaded the install CD while in windows. This automatically installed a windows program that helps install SUSE. It installs the software then reboots into the installation.

The install went without a hitch. It detected everything (screen, network, wireless) and installed a fully working opensuse system with dual boot into the unused space on the new hard drive. Very impressive.

Working

• Screen at 1024 x 768
• hard drive - mounts windows NTFS as read only, rest of HD for suse
• Wireless network
• Ethernet
• trackpad
• USB mouse
• external USB CD
• Suspend to disk, suspend to RAM *

*Suspend works, but not exactly how I would expect. The suspend to RAM is not like standby in windows where the computer practically shuts down. In this case, it is more like log out - with the machine running and waits for a password to reactivate.

Suspend to disk works, and seems to work when the system comes back up although I haven't used it enough to really make sure everything works on resume.

Not working

Closing the lid while the system is running causes everything to crash (not a good look). Choosing suspend or hibernate as options for the lid closing in the gnome power manager don't help.

Tweaks

Suse have their own menu which I don't really like. I found it better to right click on bottom panel where the menu is and choose "Add to Panel..." and add in the Traditional Main Menu from Gnome.

Conclusion

Very happy with install and how it all went. Will update this page if I come across anything else.

2 Nov 2007