Fedora 9 on Dell Latitude D620

This article covers the few steps needed to get a working Fedora 9 on a Dell Latitude D620 laptop.
To be honest, there were not much to tweak to get it working to my needs.

first of all, the specs. I have the D620 serie that comes with an intel graphic chipset i945, a broadcom BCM4312 wireless card and a 1G broadcom ethernet adapter NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express.
See below for the full lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
03:01.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ601/6912/711E0 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller (rev 40)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 01)

Now lets go over each componant that needed to be tweaked for my needs.

wireless to support ad-hoc networking
graphic to support 2* 1600x1200 external screen

That's it, the rest worked out of the box.

1. Wireless Adapter BCM4312

I need to be able to connect to an ad-hoc wireless network with wep authentication.
Unfortunately, the b43 kernel module does not allow to connect to ad-hoc network. The other solution is to use ndiswrapper.

livna repository provides an rpm, so go and add their repository, finally install ndiswrapper:

# yum install ndiswrapper

install the driver from you .inf file (this file is taken from the windows driver. So you need to get it first. The website of your constructor should provide it).

# ndiswrapper -i /path/to/bcmwl5.inf

Confirm that it is properly installed:

# /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4312) present (alternate driver: ssb)

Now generate the modprobe file:

# /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -ma

Finally, we need to blacklist the default kernel drivers: b43 and ssb. Open and edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add at the end:

blacklist b43
blacklist ssb

Finally, remove the modules that were inserted by the kernel (or reboot if you can't be bothered typing anymore):

# rmmod b43

# rmmod ssb

And load ndiswrapper:

# modprobe ndiswrapper

Now, you should be able to use the network interface "wlan0".

2. The intel i945 graphic card

the default xorg.conf was working fine for one screen, but at work, I have 2 big external screens and xorg.conf need some tweaking to get them working.
The following configuration allows me to have working fine with a single monitor (the laptop's) or 2 external screen. I simply need to run a userland script using xrandr to change the layout to 2 external screens.

You will find attach to this post: