I used a USB flash drive to boot the Debain Installer rc2 for sarge and then install debian over the network from the partial debian mirror on my desktop (using apt-proxy to get extra packages on demand).

I downloaded hd-media/boot.img.gz and uncompressed it to a 128Mb flash disk. Then I download the business card .iso image and copied that to the flash disk. This was plugged into the 510m, the boot order changed to boot from USB first and the installer started OK.

The factory configuration has a single NTFS partition occupying most of the disk and two hidden partitions: a Dell diagnostic program and a Ghost image to restore the disk back to it's factory setup. Don't delete these extra partitions as Dell do not supply Windows XP discs with the laptop. The NTFS partition can be resized using the Debian installer. I resized it to 15Gb, created a 10Gb FAT partition (for sharing between Windows & Linux), a 512Mb swap partition and a 15Gb ext3 partition.

The rest of the install was fairly smooth, following the instructions in the installer manual. I'm using the 2.6.9 kernel from unstable as this fixes some bugs present in the 2.6.8 in sarge.

I have the 54Mbps IPW 2200 card installed, which intel have now released open source drivers for (http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net). There is a Debian package for these drivers, so all you need to do is: The card requires firware which is not in the Debian package, but is available from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net. This should be untarred to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware.

To configure the card, add the following to /etc/network/interfaces (I use a static IP, see the manpage for dhcp):

Initially, I kept getting error messages on loading the module about allocating IRQ 7. Googling around, I found that the IRQ was already allocated to the paralled port, but this can be fixed by adding acpi_irq_isa=7 to the kernel command line (in /boot/grub/menu.lst). This also affected the sound card.

The ipw2200 driver does crash occasionally when using an adhoc network with WEP. The network stops working and error messages such as ERROR_DINOSTATUS_ERROR and ERROR_DMA_STATUS can be seen in the syslog. See http://www.bughost.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=409. The card can be reset by removing the module and reloading it: I've put these commands in a script to make it easier.

Other users have reported success with ndiswrapper.

The 510m has a intel 855 graphics chip, which is handled by the i810 driver in XFree. The screen resolution is 1400x1050, a bios bug means this cannot be used out of the box. A utility called 855resolution at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/apoirier/ is needed to set the correct mode with 855resolution 3c 1400 1050 somewhere in the boot sequence before X starts. Make sure to set hsync high enough in XFree config.

The default configuration for the KDE desktop didn't get the font hinting right, so I had to add the following to /etc/fonts/local.conf:

To get the Microsoft Truetype fonts, I installed the msttcorefonts package and added /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/CID to /etc/X11/fs/config and /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

Sound is handled by ALSA in the 2.6.x kernel, so once the alsa packages have been installed, all you need to do is run alsaconf. If the OSS drivers are still being loaded, make sure they're blacklisted by hotplug. The sound was also affected by the IRQ issues that affected the IPW2200 WiFi card, but was fixed by adding acpi_irq_isa=7 to the kernel parameters.

http://www.ccd.uab.es/~jordicj/linux/inspiron510m.php3

http://www.incunabulum.de/projects/computer_stuff/linuxlaptop

http://www.tribulaciones.org/blog/computers/suspend_05-12-2004

http://tuxmobil.org/dell.html