On the very first day I got the sleek Dell Inspiron 700m, I deleted all partition, then installed Gentoo on it. I did not have a chance to test Firewire port, until Proshanta generously lent me his external disk enclosure.
It worked well in Proshanta’s Windows XP and Knoppix LiveCD, but the current kernel gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r10 could not recognize the device. I booted the machine with the same Knoppix LiveCD and still found no luck. Is the Firewire port in my 700m physically dead ? This bothers me for quite a long time until I read this HOWTO:

Make sure that the SBP-2 is compiled to the kernel or the module.

Now the Firewire port works in a charm, it only takes 1m8s to transfer the 734M file from the external hard disk. I am still wondering why the Knoppix LiveCD failed to recoganize the device ?