[UPDATE] Inspiron 5150 and FreeBSD

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

After a lot of bad luck with ACPI and my new Inspiron 5150, something good
happened today.  I went to Dell's site, and they had a BIOS update for my
machine that took it to rev A23.  This was actually an update from
PhoenixBIOS to DellBIOS.  Once I got that installed, I went to Stijn
Hoop's Dell page at:

http://sandcat.nl/~stijn/freebsd/dell.php

And followed his steps to add the Dell fixes.  Note, the last chunk of the
dell-dsl.patch fails to apply, but that seems to be okay.  Once I reboot
with the patch, ACPI seems much happier.  I am able to get correct battery
status, the screen dims when I pull the AC, and sleep state S1 seems to
work.  Note, S3 causes the laptop to reload, but I think this may have to
do with Firewire (but I'm not sure).  If anyone's interested, I can
provide a stack trace.

Something else to note, that after this BIOS update, USB 2 seems to work
now.  That is, I can add a USB 2.0 jump disk, and it recognizes it, and
allows me to mount it.

Moral of the story: if you have a Dell Inspiron 5150 (and maybe 5100),
getting on the latest BIOS is a good thing.

Joe

PGP Key : http://www.marcuscom.com/pgp.asc