The Dell 9400 / e1705 is a nice laptop - great combination of high res 1920x1200 17" display and a dual core 2 duo processor - the ideal desktop replacement. Except - There exists a serious design flaw with this laptop - the video card gets very hot causing it to eventually fail.

The symptoms (any of these):

• Flickering video
• Graphic corruption on your screen (lines, stripes, dots, squares, jumbled mess)
• Laptop won't turn on - on light flickers for a second and off again.

Cracked Solder Joints

It is most likely that your nVidia 7800/7900gs is failing due to the stress of heating up and cooling down.

This usually leads to cracked solder joints.

Shake 'n Bake

Shake 'n bake is a term I use for this method - shake the bits off and bake it!

Yes, that's right- we're going to bake the card in our kitchen oven at 200c for 10min.

This will melt the solder and repair the card.

Important Notes

• The GPU on the video card is connected to the heat sink and requires thorough cleaning and high quality thermal paste (or similar) - I have used Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste.
• To improve the cooling and life of this fix, you can purchase special 'copper shims" from eBay that aid with better cooling.
• Be sure not to let your oven rise above 200c and limit the exposure to 10min.
• If the first attempt is not successful, repeat. I have read that other people have required two or three roastings to fully repair their cards.

  I have done two and each only required one bake for 10min.

The two laptops I fixed have been working great ever since.. I'll post if they ever fail again.

Here's a video of my repair effort.

Getting the Intel Matrix RAID working on my P6X58D Premium took a bit of searching and good luck despite how simple the solution.

Update: This works for Fedora 13 also.

My Configuration:

Primary OS - 64GB SSD: /dev/sda

Storage - 2 * 1GB Sata: /dev/sdb & /dev/sdc - Configured as Raid 0 with the Matrix Storage Manager bios setup.

Symptoms:

No device present in /dev/mapper/

dmraid finds my raid 'device' but:

[root@xxx xxx]# dmraid -ay
RAID set "isw_ebibiffebg_DataVolume01" was not activated
ERROR: device "isw_ebibiffebg_DataVolume01" could not be found

Hmmmm!

[root@xxx xxx]# dmesg
device-mapper: table: 253:2: mirror: Device lookup failure
device-mapper: ioctl: error adding target to table
device-mapper: ioctl: device doesn't appear to be in the dev hash table.

Hmmm...

Solution:

After a lot of searching and digging I finally found that I need to disable a kernel module/feature/whatever by editing my /boot/grub/grub.conf by adding the noiswmd option to the end of the boot options like:

After the modifications and rebooting I now have:

[karl@hummer ~]$ ls -la /dev/mapper
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 140 2010-05-23 13:24 .
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4180 2010-05-23 14:34 ..
crw-rw---- 1 root root 10, 62 2010-05-23 13:23 control
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253, 0 2010-05-23 13:24 isw_ebibiffebg_DataVolume01
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253, 1 2010-05-23 17:39 isw_ebibiffebg_DataVolume01p1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253, 2 2010-05-23 13:24 vg_xxxxxx-lv_root
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253, 3 2010-05-23 13:24 vg_xxxxxx-lv_swap


Done - now just mount your drive like any other (or partition, or what ever) eg:

I can mount it like:

mount /dev/mapper/isw_ebibiffebg_DataVolume01p1 /data

Or add to your /etc/fstab:

/dev/mapper/isw_ebibiffebg_DataVolume01p1 /data ntfs-3g rw,defaults,umask=0000 0 0

Hopefully you don't have to search as hard I as did to find this solution.

Now go and enjoy that raid!

I've finally got the popcorn hour toolchain to compile on fedora 10.

Here I'll present a step-by-step how-to.

Step 1: Get the toolchain source

First you'll need to get the toolchain source: Syabas NMT (SMP8634) toolchain.

I used the version smp86xx_toolchain.20080505.tar.bz2.

Step 2: Ensure some dependent packages are installed

Next ensure that the following packages are installed, you can use Add/Remove software if you prefer:

Given that Fedora has made it so easy to put a live cd image onto a usb or other external drive to provide a bootable take anywhere OS.

First off, you'll need the Fedora Live CD or DVD iso image, they can be found on the Fedora home page http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

You'll also need to install some other packages available in the standard repos.

Install livecd-tools with your package manager.

Console mode is great for some tasks, but why live with 80x25 when by adding vga=775 to your grub line will give you 160x160 mode (using 1280x1024)... Simple and sweet.

Fedora 9 (F9 Sulphur) has been released. Here I will record my personal setup. Note, this is a work in progress and will be updated as I (slowly) configure my system.

My setup: Dell Inspiron 9400 (E1705)

• Audio device: Intel 82801G High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
• IDE interface: Intel 82801GBM/GHM SATA IDE Controller (rev 01)
• Video: nVidia Corporation GeForce Go 7900 GS (rev a1)
• Ethernet: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
• FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller
• Network controller: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)