Re: Need help with error messages at startup of RedHat Linux (with GNOME)

I opened up every access port I could find on this Dell Latitude
XPi P133ST, even discovered how to pull out the hard disk (an IBM
OEM model), but I don't see anything that looks like a battery.
Where is it located? How can I get to it?
From: Daniel Ganek <degs...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
It's a laptop. The battery could be under the keyboard.

Well I took "could" to mean "should" or "probably would", and I
tried unscrewing the three tiny (but very long) phillips screws on
the bottom. The result: The faceplate over the keyboard, which
contains the trackball+buttons and the internal speaker, tilted up,
which freed the keyboard itself to tilt up. I didn't see anything
that looked like a battery anywhere in there, but under the
keyboard I saw a four-wire ribbon cable, orange plastic insulation
except at the loose end where there was a four-pin metal plug just
floating free, not plugged in anywhere. I didn't see any obvious
place it would plug in. Does anybody know where it goes? I don't
know whether it was hanging loose all the time I had the laptop, or
whether it came unplugged as I was flipping the keyboard up and
down after I removed the phillips screws. Even if I do eventually
find the battery, I don't want to plug in the laptop again until
that ribbon cable is somewhere other than floating loose making
random contact with any metal object it finds, such as the metallic
bottom of the keyboard.

As an alterative to replacing the battery, I'm thinking maybe I
should just remove the hard disk and stick it into another free
laptop I can find somewhere. That way I'd be able to keep all my
files (including Java and J2EE) even if I switch laptops. Does
anybody know of an organization in the San Jose (California) area
that matches up throw-away-but-mostly-working laptops with
low-income people who would like one for free or just a few
dollars? Do most laptops have the same size slot and connector
design, so that a hard drive from one kind of laptop would just
plug into another kind of laptop? Or do I need to specify some
particular connector type and slot shape when I ask for a
free/lowcost laptop? Does RedHat Linux automatically configure
itself to a different machine if the hard disk is put into some
completely different laptop with power down then power is turned
on? (I know that it explores the available RAM etc. during booting.
Is that enough to completely recognize what kind of machine it
happens to be in, and configure RedHat Linux to work on that
machine?) (I figure it's the ROM BIOS, which is in the computer
itself, not on the hard disk, which starts the bootstrap process,
right? But at some point it must recognize that Linux is on the
hard disk, and the hardware and disk-based system must somehow get
working together, right?)
.