I am going insane.

I have spent the last 3 days trying to get linux installed on the laptop I bought recently, a Dell Inspiron 2200.

It is a complete pain in the arse.

First it took me a day to try to get the install process going. I was trying to boot the install off a usb memory thing, but it wouldn't have a bar of that. It would only boot if I accessed the device directly, without partitioning it, and then when it booted, it couldn't find the netinst iso on the device with it.

I gave up in the end, on Monday afternoon, and just burned it on a cd, and used that. Then I didn't partition the disk properly, ran out of space in the /usr partition, and after fiddling around for a while, gave up, and reinstalled, after repartitioning the disk.

The next fun is trying to get X working.

I've gone through umpteen different kernel versions. Neither the 2.4 or 2.6 debian kernel packages are new enough, neither supported the graphics chip properly, and the 2.6 one had major issues with samba.

I went back to the 2.4 latest from kernel.org, thought I was getting close. I found the drm drivers for the chip on intel's site, but can't get these to work, it always fails trying to load agpgart.

I then went and found the latest 2.6 from kernel.org, because I'd seen references in the changelog to support for the i915 chipset.

I got this, compiled it, installed it, and it looked like it might work, agpgart was coming up happily, and the drm stuff looks like it should work.

Of course the debian package for XFree86 is bloody old, so I went and got the latest one from XFree86.org, and installed that, but I'll be buggered if I can get that to work, keeps complaing about not being able to load the drm module or something.

I tried out the commercial drivers linked to on intel's page for the drivers for the chipset, "Snap" didn't support it, and the other one, "scix" or something I think it was, worked fine. But it's only a demo, only runs for 25 minutes at a time, and I'm not paying $150 for a driver.

When I investigated the dri/drm stuff more, I found that apparently XFree86 is being dumped in favour of Xorg.

I tried installing Xorg, (that was a saga in itself, with apt-get getting it's knickers in a knot), got a little bit closer (or so I thought), but now it's complaining that it can't load the agpgart kernel module.. in 2.6.11 agpgart is not a module, you either have it or you don't, in the kernel, so it's possibly part of the problem.

Another part of the problem, seems to be that the drm kernel modules is supposed to create /dev/dri/Card0 or something, however /dev/dri is empty, so Xorg/XFree86 can't interface to the kernel module.

It tries to fall back to VESA mode or something, but then that won't even start, perhaps because the screen modes aren't defined properly, but I can't find them documented anywhere.

Argh. WTF is going on?