Just installed eCS 2.2 (beta II) on my Dell Latitude e6400 and wanted to share my experience.
This 14" Dell Latitude e6400 has an 80 GB hard drive, 2 GB RAM, an Intel core 2 Duo processor and 2.41 gHz processor speed. Mine was shipped to me in 2009 with the 64-bit Windows Vista Business edition. Dell does not provide support for Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10, but it works well and is very fast on Windows 10 and is also very good with Windows 8.1. This is a tough little laptop and is very common. It can be purchased for a low price from nearly any hardware vendor.
[NOTE]: Dell no longer sells this laptop directly and they recomend the
Dell Latitude (E6430) premier instead.These newer latitudes are about $1,000 each. Mine was
$250 from a prominent
reseller.
Since this laptop was built before the introduction of the newer/faster UEFI BIOS versions, it requires a little bit of thought and preparation before installing WARP 3, 4 or WARP Server for ebusiness. I was not able to install OS/2 version 2.1.
For the A15 BIOS, Dell used a variety of security and boot-checking options that together are very similar to the functionality of our current UEFI computers. Most of these need to be adjusted or disabled to enable a non-UEFI operating system like warp 4 to boot normally. These security options are spread across the security, boot sequence, performance and system management sections of the setup screens
I adjusted the following security features to enable OS/2 to load its install sequence:
Under Security:
Disabled fast boot and instead chose "thorough" under boot checking
Disabled password checking during boot
Disabled Intel speedstep
disabled camera
disabled Fn key support
disabled lighted keyboard
At this point, I inserted the eCS 2.2 beta II DVD and booted from the DVD drive. eCS Installation volume manager did not recognize my NTFS main partition or my Windows journal partition. I used the FreeDOS 1.1 FDISK utility to wipe the drive of the non-DOS partitions. I enabled FAT32 large disk support and created one huge 80 GB partition. I exited Fdisk and rebooted the laptop with the eCS 2.2 DVD in the drive. This time, LVM had no problem identifying my disk and created a new MBR. After another reboot the installation started again and the LVM was able to work with my hard drive. I used simple install to see where it would take me. I recommend using advanced install method so that system files can be in one partition while user data is located on another partition.
eCS automatically loaded ACPI support for the Intel core 2 Duo so multiprocessor support was not a problem.
For disk preparation, I chose to format the drive using JFS w. After 1 hour and 16 minutes of disk checking, the installer began to format hard drive with JFS. After that, the installation was fairly straightforward and problem-free. my IDT Integrated Audio Sound card was automatically detected and the UNIAUD driver was installed. I chose Generic VGA for my monitor type rather than use the suggested Scitech driver. Afterwards, I installed the Panorama driver. I skipped network configuration for the time being.
After the first reboot, the installer automatically suggested the Panorama video driver. I was able to increase the display resolution
and set up the "eCS desktop" wallpaper. For wireless networking, I am using the "Iogear universal wireless-n adapter" (GWU627).
It needs to use a static IP address (192.168.1.252) before being connected with an existing network