How I did it!


I have a Dell Inspiron 500m laptop that came with windowsXP preinstalled. This laptop comes with an integrated video card on the motherboard, namely the intel extreme 855GM video card. Even windowsXP does not run in 1024x768 resolution if you were to reinstall the OS. It needs a special software driver which comes separately on CD. The BIOS does not allow for more memory to be allocated to the video card, though the specs will tell you that you can have 64meg of shared memory for video.


I decided to run Lindows on this machine, and all I got was a 640x480 resolution screen in 16 bits of colour. No amount of tweaking in the control panel to set the resolution and screen size to a higher level worked. I sent an email to lindows support and was directed to dell support forum. There I found that many users were having problems installing linux on Dell laptops that had the integrated video card. Someone wrote a patch for the video chipset that could allocate more memory to the video card. I tried this and it never worked with lindows. I was able to install RedHat and Mandrake and get 1024x768 screen resolution after installing the patch. I sent a few emails to Lindows support asking for help. I was told that Redhat and Mandrake used Xfree4.3 while lindows (before ver 4.5) used xfree 4.2, and that was probably the reason why I could not use the patch.


Lindows ver 4.5 came out and I tried the patch again. This time I could get a 1024x768 screen resolution, but only after running the patch in a console and doing a quick restart. I was not able to get the OS to boot into the 1024x768 resolution. It would start in 640x480 resolution. I have to open a console and run the patch to allocate 32 megs of RAM, and then when I did a quick restart, I was able to get a 1024x768 screen resolution. I had to do this each time I started Lindows. However I have found the solution on the internet to get Lindows to start in 1024x768 resolution


The current version of Lindows (4.5) when installed caused the screen to flicker very badly. I had to edit the XF86Config-4 file and in the device section had to change Driver = “vesa” to “i810”. A quick restart gave a flicker free screen.


Here's how I went about to get Lindows 4.5 to run in a 1024x768 screen resolution.


  1. After installing Lindows edited the file XF86Config-4 file to change driver “vesa” to “i810” in the device section.

  2. Installed the 855patch. I have converted the rpm file found on http://projects.nudieman.com/500m to a deb file using alien. Did a “dpkg --install 855patch.deb” to install the patch.

  3. Next followed instructions on http://geocities.com/randomnumbergenerator2001/ to allow the system to boot into 1024x768 resolution

    In console mode typed the following instructions.

    echo “/usr/sbin/855patch 32000”>/etc/init.d/855patch

    chmod +x /etc/init.d/855patch

    ln -s /etc/init.d/855patch /etc/rcS.d/S20-855patch

This I presume allocated 32 MB of RAM at bootup. I found out that Lindows dumped the patch in the /usr/sbin directory (hence a slight variation from the actual instructions on http://geocities.com/randomnumbergenerator2001/ )

After all this configuration changes, Lindows starts in 1024x768 resolution.


I have to thank a lot of people who had come up with the patch (Christian Zeitz) and for anglete for the 855patch.rpm and for Damien Solley for instrutions to install linux in Dell inspiron 1100. The 855patch.deb file is available here.


Please let me know if you succeed.

I can be contacted at davaraj@davaraj.com