My old laptop finally died after 7 hard years of service! The laptop is dead. Long live the laptop… [updated 28 Dec 2009]

The good

Xubuntu installed really quickly, absolutely no bugs or crashes. In half an hour my system was liberated and cleansed of that corporate virus called M$ Vista, the 500Gb hard drive was formatted with the new ext4 fs, and lightening-fast, beautiful, simple-yet-flexible xubuntu was up and running (I was once a KDE enthusiast but we went our different ways when they set the path for KDE4/Dolphin).

The Radeon graphics card was immediatly supported (with the open source driver) and although I’ve not done anything to really test its capabilities, it seems fab.

Whether it’s the processor speed or the 4Gb of RAM I don’t know, but intensive tasks are a breeze. I love RawTherapee for processing RAW digital camera images (photos I’ve done with this), and the results of changes are immediate (on my last computer I would have to wait about a second to see the effect of a change).

Being ubuntu/debian based I was able to get all my favourite applications installed and working really quickly: firefox, thunderbird, Openoffice, Apache+PHP, MySQL, Gvim, Inkscape, SSH… and added some excellent new-to-me software too:

• tilda (to replace yakuake)
• gigolo/gvfs (a much more satisfactory replacement for KDE’s kio slaves)
• cheese for the built-in webcam which just worked straight away.

The bad

Of course it won’t suspend. Or rather it won’t wake. Whether this is really an issue is debatable: if I want instant-on then just don’t suspend it. If I want to keep my apps open then hibernate works fine (although takes 30 seconds to turn off and about a minute to turn on again). Otherwise shutdown takes just a few seconds and boot times are around 40s anyway thanks to the new upstart implementation.

The fan seems quite keen to be on (pretty much all the time) and is quite noisy.

The ugly

So I’ve had a little “fun” getting stuff working, but I’m almost there. Here’s where I got to with the more challenging bits:

Wireless

Dell studios come with either an intel or a broadcom card. The first is reported to just work. You can guess which one mine had….

I have the Broadcom 14e4:4315 chipset (as reported by lspci) which is actually BCM4312 802.11b/g – low power.

There seemed to be a lot of chatter about the b43 open source driver although linuxwireless reports that support for my card is “in progress” (26 Nov 2009). A very long ubuntuforums thread implies it’s straight forward to get it up and running in karmic. But I could not get this to work. Lots of Fatal DMA errors in the syslog, as reported by lots of other users on that thread.

In the end I went with the proprietary wl driver, in the package bcmwl-kernel-source which only works if you uninstall linux-backports-modules-karmic. It works just fine, so far!

The only confusing thing is the hardware wireless (radio) switch (F2). If that’s off (and there is nothing to tell you whether it is or isn’t – no lights, no syslog entries…) then obviously, it’s not going to be able to connect.

I was really pleased to see that the latest version of Network Manager has support for fixed IP addresses per-network, too because previously I had to do a bodge (you can kill -STOP dhcp and then assign different ip with ifconfig using a hook in /etc/network/if-up.d/) to achieve that.

Brightness buttons

Put acpi=noapic in grub’s kernel options and these will work again. For a while. And sometimes not. And one poster reported that this caused the fan to come on more, which makes me think that has something to do with it. The screen is so bright! It is useful to be able to turn it down (as well to save battery power). See helpful comments below from Martin on this.

The BIOS lets you choose what the function/multtimedia keys require the Fn button for. Oddly my BIOS seems to keep resetting itself to Multimedia first, which is annoying because I regularly use function keys. (this odd behaviour has gone away and now my function keys work fine).

Monitor Gamma was way too high

I now use xgamma in an autostart script to set more correct levels. I used Norman Koren’s 3 colour charts to find appropriate values.I’ve added the Gamma settings into the Monitor section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf which was created by (from console)

sudo service gdm stop
Xorg -configure
sudo mv xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
    ...add this line into the Monitor section:
    Gamma           1.03 0.86 0.67
    ...
sudo service gdm start

Install ATI’s graphics driver

I got very poor OpenGL performance with the open source driver, so I switched to the fglrx driver and things are much better, I’ve even fallen to temptation and installed compiz! However the nice fade from splash to desktop on boot up does not work anymore.

There was a problem with slow alt-tab switching, too (w/out compiz but with xfce’s compositor turned on). I realised that this is solved by turning off the option to show a border around the windows while alt-tabbing. No tears shed for turning that switch off!

So there you go. If there’s anything you think I should know, please post a comment!

This entry was posted on November 26, 2009 at 11:25 pm and is filed under technical gibberings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.