Minty Dell(icious)

Before I get too far into the new Dell experience, a few updates on the last post about the D620.

First: I said in that post that the D620 had a keyboard light, but it did not work under Linux. That was not correct. The D620 has a key sequence to activate a keyboard light. Fn-right arrow. This appears to be a case where the D620 must share a keyboard with some other model. The bit I thought was the non-working light is apparently an ambient light sensor.

Second: I made a statement about the screen being nicer than my Acer 5610. That was not utterly accurate either. The screen is higher resolution, with better Dots Per Inch (DPI), making for nice looking fonts and an easy to read but fairly small screen. But that is not all there is to a screen.

I brought up a picture I took while on vacation. It is of my mountain home, from a distance. Green in the foreground, blue sky. Fluffy clouds. Shadows of the clouds on the ground. Very bright day. Terrific exposure and saturation. On my Apple iMac or MacBook, the picture is amazing. (OK: I admit: I like looking at "my" mountain. The picture may not be all that great) On the Acer, it is pretty nice. On the Dell, it is washed out and low contrast.

This particular D620 LCD panel is fine for email and general business use, but I would not choose this panel if I was going to be spending a great deal of time doing image editing in the GIMP or something along those lines. As a last minute thought, I loaded up the picture on the IBM T41, and have to say that it is pretty washed out there too. High rez: 1440 x 1050. Just washed out. The T41 is also old, and the Cold Cathode Tube is fading in intensity as time goes by as well. Still: It makes me wonder if laptop vendors target resolution over accurate color rendition for the business market computer. Another thought: I bet that is why Apple has a rep for expensive hardware: They clearly did not cut any corners on their LCD panels. Makes sense, since the Apple is often used in graphic applications: There is a reason creative types like Apples, and now I see it is not just the applications.

Finally (on the D620 front today): Another Linuxen here at the office installed Mint 3.0 on their D620. Exactly the same hardware as mine as near as I can tell. Works great there too, with one exception: he can not move the mouse via the trackpad without highlighting everything on the screen. He is going to try and load up the "gsynaptics" package and see if he can fix that.

One other data point of a more general Dell / Linux laptop nature: According to Issue 52 of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, in "United Kingdom, France and Germany [consumers] can order an Inspiron 6400 notebook or an Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed".

Dell C400 and Linux Mint 3.0

First off, a bit of background about why I would be on this Dell / Linux Laptop riff lately. Up till recently, I have only ever installed Linux on one Dell, and that was back in the 1990's. It worked fine. The Dell hardware of the day was a real brick. Solid. Worked. Easy to work on. Very very slow by today's standards: 286 or 386 processor. I had a few negative Dell laptop hardware experiences on some of their later 1990's / early 2000's gear that put me off working with them any more. Part of my definition of a good computer is one I can fix when it breaks, and that particular time-series of Dells appeared to be designed to not be serviceable by anyone with less than four hands.

Things change.

I was first intrigued again by Dell when they started to talk about creating Linux supported consumer gear. That always gets my attention. Then, in talking to whurley, he mentioned he liked his new Dell (running Ubuntu I believe). He said in our podcast a while back that the Dell had some features he really liked. He was not specific then, but I started to wonder what those features were.

Then, as I was getting ready for LinuxWorld, I went around booting Knoppix on everything I could get my hands on, and all the Dells I tried from other people at the office all worked fine. The deal was sealed when the D620 of the last post arrived and worked so well. It was time to try Linux on the Dell C400.

C400 Heritage and Specs

I would be remiss if I did not point out that the Dell C400 I have is another of my trash pile specials. It started out life as multiple computers that were in a Star Trek Transporter Accident (tm) and merged to become this one computer. The battery is taped in. The top cover has cracks. The keyboard is small, cramped, and highly polished on the keytops. But the C400 works. It in fact surprised me over time in that it just kept running and running.

What it was running was MS Windows XP though. On a 12 GB, 4200 RPM, extremely noisy hard drive. I have no external CD that the C400 will boot. Looks like there is a connector on the side for some special external one it was supposed to have. I don't have one.

Back in its day... about 2002 according to the review at PC Magazine, the C400 was considered a nifty ultra-expensive ultra-portable. It was "fast", with a Pentium portable 1.2 Ghz processor. It started with 256 MB RAM.

My trash heap Dell's hard drive was clearly not stock: the review says the base disk was 30 GB. This unit was 12 GB. It booted XP though. Slowly. I had stuffed 1 GB of RAM in SIMM slots: I had several of the slow PC 133 memory sticks laying around from other departed systems.

The single USB port is 1.1, and not bootable. Not that I did not try.

Without a boot-able media to start it from, the C400 kept running XP not-so-silently in the corner while I watched it to see if it would die because of its rough treatment by the transporter. The D620 working so well with Linux meant now I really wanted to test that C400. The Transporter Chief (err... me.) came up with another way to stuff Linux under the covers. First we get a hair from the hair brush, and then we re-program the transporter Bio-filters..... no... wait. That was Dr. Pulaski on Season two on ST:TNG.

I Regret That I Have Only One T40 to ...

Another computer in the parts pile is an IBM T40. This one must have had some drink with a lot of sugar spilled into it. It booted still. It's screen was bright and beautiful. I had a 40 GB , 5400 RPM drive in it, and because the T40 has an internal CD, I had Mint 3.0 installed. Problem was, the keyboard was uselessly grunged with sticky junk. And wiggle the monitor... or even type very hard, the the screen flickers and turns off and on and does other random goofiness. And because the keyboard is slimed and sticky, you have to pound it to make the keys register correctly. Not useable.

But...

I had that hard drive in there. All built. Ready to go. Doh.

Beam Me Up Linux

If there is anything cool about Linux (and there are so many things that are) it is that it does not really care when you take the hard drive from a computer from IBM and install it in a computer from Dell. I would have preferred the T40 be more use-able: the screen and the keyboard are (normally) way way better than the C400's. That was not to be (although I still have the T40 in case I can figure out how to fix the screen flicker thing).

The Mint equipped Dell booted, the screen went bonkers, X died, and I ended up in a really flaky TTY session. Huge fonts. This was not unexpected. The /etc/X11/xorg.conf from the IBM was totally wrong for the Dell. I mv'ed the file with "sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.ibm", entered my password, and then rebooted.

X found no config, and built a new one that was correct for the hardware (and boy is that nicer than having to hack it together by hand like it used to be). Screen came up.

Surprise Surprise Surprise ...

(A Star Trek and a Gomer Pyle reference in one post. Double geek points!)

Now the nice stuff started happening. The new hard drive was clearly faster than the old one. What had felt sluggish before under XP now felt fairly fast and crisp. OK. I changed the OS on the hard drive too, I admit.

Mint 3.0 was clearly happy in its new home. It found the Wifi Card and configured it, no problem. It turns out that the Dell TrueMobile 1150 card that was inside the unit had the extremely-well-supported-by-Linux Orinoco chipset on it, according to "lspci".

On screen displays for volume up/down/mute appear. Suspend works, even from the "Fn-F1" keyboard sequence. Mint clearly supports all the hardware features I have thought to test, but given the wireless card being Orinoco, so would Fedora. This is very Linux simpatico gear.

So: How long has Dell been thinking about supporting Linux anyway?