On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 01:59:18PM -0500, Vaibhav Vaidya wrote:
> I have a Dell Inspiron 9300. I've had a couple of hardware related
> problems:
> 
> 1> My dvd playback was choppy, so I was looking around and found that the
> IDE interface on the laptop is SATA (I have a 7500rpm drive and a dvd
> drive). The default driver for my hard drive is ata_piix, and it is
> mounted as scsi. So I assume everything is working OK. However, for my DVD
> drive it uses some generic driver. I believe a SATA driver may be in
> order, but I am not sure... My dvd drive is TSSTcorp CD-RW/DVD-ROM
> TSL462C, mounted as /dev/hdc by default, as a 24x ATAPI drive with 1536kB
> Cache. The driver is Uniform CD-ROM driver Regision: 3.20
> The problem is I cant get DMA to work on the drive, using hdparm and
> sysconfig/harddisks. The drive works perfectly in WinXP :(

1) google: "hdparm sata"

2) First match : http://freshmeat.net/projects/hdparm/

3) Excerpt: "SATA drives in the 2.6 kernel are handled by the new "libata" SCSI driver.
   If you add the "ATA passthru" patch (from Jeff Garzik) to your kernel, then
   hdparm can work with those drives."

> 2> My display is capable of 1920*1200, and this is recognised by linux, my
> display card ATI Mobility Radeon X300 is also recognised and an
> appropriate driver loaded, but I can only get to like 1600*1000
> resolution. If I try to set 1920*1200, I get a tiled repetition of screens
> which keeps getting corrupted.

1) What ("appropriate") driver?

2) Check HorizSync and VertRefresh values in your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
   to match the values of your monitor

> 5> I cant get the Fn key extensions on my keyboard to work, like CD eject,
> volume, wifi on/off...

man xmodmap
man xev