Linux Mint 3.0 and the Single Dell

A new computer... A Dell D620 laptop... has become the latest Linux Mint 3.0 computer. It seems to happen every time a computer falls withing my reach, I will admit. What was interesting about this particular one was the following:

• Dell has started shipping Linux Computers, as has Lenovo. Dells are Ubuntu, and Lenovo's are Novell / SUSE.

• Dell recently expanded the list of supported hardware, but the D620 was not on their list.

• Mint 3.0, an Ubuntu 7.04 derivative, runs like a scalded dog on the D620. A sign of things to come from Dell? One can hope.

If you hop over to the Dell / Ubuntu website, you'll see the current Ubuntu notebook (depending on when you are reading this to be sure) is the 1420 N. Not the D620. Despite this, the D620 is working and very well. The volume buttons (little special buttons above the keypad) work, and there is an on-screen display of their status. The screen backlight keys work, but no onscreen status appears for them. The keyboard light (hey: there is a keyboard light! How Thinkpad!) does not activate. Not yet anyway.  BIOS thing? Does it work under XP? No idea. Future thing to check.

The Intel Pro 3945ABG works without issue, and at full G speed.

The Synaptics touchpad config utility had to be loaded, via the Synaptic package manager. No that is not stuttering. And then I had to pop a line about the "SHMConfig" into /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

 
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
        Option          "HorizScrollDelta"      "0"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "true"
EndSection

When I make changes to the mouse acceleration speed in Gnome, it only affects the wiggle stick: the touchpad needs a separate control program (gsnaptics under Gnome, ksynaptics under KDE), and there is no acceleration setting for it even then. It is kind of funny that the D620 has both pointing devices. Easier than two SKU's I guess. I can turn off the touchpad altogether and just use the wiggle stick if  I like.

The 1440 x 900 screen is pretty, bright, and the Intel 945 graphics card controlling it automatically detected and configured, because Mint includes the  "915Resolution" package by default. Last time I checked Ubuntu, I had to manually load that. Given the prevalence of these Intel cards on "low end" (non-high-end-graphics, no games) laptops, seems like 915Resolution should be included by all Distros.

This particular D620 unit has two Gigabytes of RAM, and 80 GB hard drive set to dual boot MS Win XP (emergencies only!), and and a Core 2, T7200, 2Ghz processor good for 7984 BogoMIPS. It is fast, but also runs cool: 48C most of the time according to LMSensors. Only one thermal zone found in the ACPI. HDDTEMP (loaded with Synaptic) says that the hard drive is only 40C. Both of these are after the computer has been up for over four hours, and been used to write this for over an hour.

I did boot over to XP first, configured the hardware, let the corporate image do whatever it does upon booting, and left it for a while so all the Marimba patches, scans, and certification and inventories and whatnot could be done. It was fast under XP, and ran cool there as well. I assume that the correct drivers for XP were all installed to make that work. I have certainly seen other computers (like my wife's Toshiba M45 or my old eMachines 5312) that run way hotter under MS Windows than Linux. MS Windows playtime over,  I grabbed Mint 3.0, and did the LiveCD boot. Manually done disk partition is pretty typical for a dual boot laptop I have built. Four partitions:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1824    14651248+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            1825        3040     9767520   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            3041        3283     1951897+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4            3284        9729    51777495   83  Linux

Mint sets up grub so that everything boots OK. All auto-magic.

In fact, setting up Mint 3.0 on the D620 has so far mirrored the experience of setting it up on my main personal Linux computer, the Acer 5610, except the Acer occasionally boots Vista off /dev/sda1, not XP. Even though I literally just received the D620, it is not on the Dell web site any more. It has been replaced by the D630. There are differences between the Dell and the Acer that are odd: the Acer has a Flash memory card reader, which does not appear to even be an option on the Dell: I guess business class computers only read USB flash fobs... The Dell has four USB ports though, so that is not too bad.  The Acer screen resolution is not as good (1280 x 800 versus 1440x900), but given the price difference in the computers, I would expect the Dell to have the better screen.

Linux runs great. Everything important seems to work. Mint provides all the bits to make this a business class Linux computer: Evolution and OpenOffice are available or installed. So far, so good. Dell may not list this as a Linux supported computer, but I see no reason they shouldn't.

It Was Not Always This Way, Except When It Was

I used to have a Dell laptop, way way back. It was built like a brick, lasted forever, and even back in the 1990's I ran Linux on it. But then, in my opinion, the quality of the Dell laptops lapsed. My father in law sent me one to fix that was from four or five years *after* the first one I had, and I took it apart, and decided it was a total loss. I sent him back a eBay-purchased, hand-assembled Compaq M300 with his data migrated from the Dell. That generation Dell laptop was a nightmare to work on, and the build quality was just not happy making. I would have been supporting that thing every two months from then on. Assuming I could get it back together at all (and at the time, I was rebuilding Power 4 based Apple iBooks: no small feat.). I took apart a few other slightly later Dells we had in the trash pile at the office, and assembled some working ones out of those, but they were still awful to work on, and to use a technical term, persnickity.

I bring all this up not to say bad things about Dell but to say a good one: The D620 is head and shoulders better built than my father in laws. It is great to see that Dell has heard the voice of the customer, and in so many different ways. Ubuntu support. Quality improvements. Linux compatibility hardware even in the non-officially supported gear.

Parts is Parts

It is also worth noting that all computer vendors use parts that are the same, manufacturer to manufacturer. Hard drives from any given vendor can be found all over the place, for example. In Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba, and Apple you might find the same 120GB hard drive from, say, Samsung, or Toshiba, or Seagate. The recent flammable battery issue with Dells was hardly limited to Dell: they just happened to have bought as a percentage more of the bad batteries from the vendor than others.

Hard drives are a particular issue since they are complex, tiny, close tolerance, have moving parts, and in laptops, get schlepped about. Sometimes what is different is how the vendor engineers all the bits around the common parts: are there shock cradles and adequate cooling and the like? The same part may work well in one machine, and fail often in a different machine.

I have two reasons for bringing all that up: one will be that I will be interested to see how well the D620 stands the test of time. The other is to mention that I recently had to rebuild my Apple MacBook Pro, because the hard drive had an issue. I'll have a post up soon about that over at http://on-being-open.blogspot.com. [Hello from the future: post is now up! Kind of like surfs up, only indoors and only involves computers.]

In the meantime, it is the commonality of the parts stack that makes it so companies like Dell can assemble computers that run Linux well. By choosing parts that Linux already has support for, like the Intel WiFi card, they make it easy to run Linux on their gear. Obviously, I have not tried this with every single possible Dell computer. There may be some for which this is not the case. But it *is* the case for this D620, newest member of the Linux laptop clan here at BMC.