Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on Dell Latitude D820

Component	Status	Notes
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz) 4M L2 Cache, 667Mhz Dual Core	Works	Needed to install 686 SMP kernel to support both CPUs. NOTE: CPU scaling monitor shows only one CPU (design issue). By default seems to run CPU0 at 1 GHz and CPU1 at 2.33 GHz on AC. If I manually muck with powernowd I can change that. When booted on battery seems to be at 1 GHz both.
15.4 inch Wide Screen WSXGA+ LCD Panel, 1680x1050 pixels	Works
2.0GB, DDR2-667 SDRAM, 2 DIMMS	Works
100GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 7200RPM	Works
8X DVD+/-RW w/Roxio Digital Media™ and Cyberlink Power DVD™	Problems	Update: Hotswapped from 8X DVD with Cyberlink Power DVD™, automatically found new hardware! CD/DVD recording extremely slow. For some reason seems to think this is a SCSI device(?) (/dev/scd0), and I've only seen instructions on how to make sure DMA is enabled for IDE devices. Saw some notes that mentioned CD being recognized as SCSI might happen when you have SATA hard drives. sudo hdparm -t /dev/cdrom gives "Timing buffered disk reads: 6 MB in 3.89 seconds = 1.54 MB/sec", sudo -t /dev/dvd gives "Timing buffered disk reads: 14 MB in 3.37 seconds = 4.15 MB/sec" but I don't know how to test burning speeds.
512MB NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 120M TurboCache™	Works	Both default nv and nvidia work fine. NOTE: The GPU runs worryingly hot, up to 83 Celsius with normal Gnome desktop on idle.
Intel® 3945 802.11a/g Dual-Band Mini Card	Works
Wireless switch	Works
Wireless activity light	Works
Wireless activity light, side	Does not work
Dell Wireless® 350 Bluetooth Module	Untested
Wired network	Untested
9 Cell Primary Battery	Works	Seems like I get a bit under 3 hours with this
Touchpad	Works	Ubuntu mouse speed control does not work. Set the following options in xorg.conf for synaptic: "MinSpeed" "0.7", "MaxSpeed" "3", "AccelFactor" "0.03". Set "SHMConfig" "1" if you want to control this with qsynaptic (qsynaptic did not let me make it any faster than ubuntu default, only slower).
Trackpoint	Works
Mouse buttons	Works
USB Mouse	Works
Firewire	Problems	Needed to manually modprobe the driver, but then it worked with my camcorder.
IR	Untested	Manually modprobing driver seems to load it ok, but haven't tried beyond that.
Modem	Untested
PCMCIA cards	Untested
Express cards	Untested
Sound/loudspeakers	Works	In some rare cases I seem to lose sound. Rebooting needed to fix.
Microphone (builtin and headset)	Problems	Before I want to capture sound using microprohone, I need to do the following: start Sound Recorder, File > Open Volume Control, Options tab, change to Line, change to Mic, verify that sound record works. Using HDA Intel (ALSA mixer).
Headphones	Problems	In some cases plug and play does not seem to work; connecting headphones and rebooting sometimes needed. Sometimes just reboot is needed, after which plug and play works.
Display brightness	Problems	Only tested with nvidia, but works fine with Fn+up/down/left. At some point it automatically dimmed when going to battery, but doesn't do that anymore for some reason. The Power Management Preferences don't include a brightness slider nor does dimming on idle happen - apparently that should be in gnome-power-manager 2.16 but Dapper has only 2.14.
Display sleep	Works
Suspend	Problems	15% failure rate. Works almost perfectly with nvidia and color depth 24. Color depth 16 makes this flaky. Sometimes wireless does not work; need to disable and enable networking in Network Manager to resume wireless.
Hibernate	Problems	40% failure rate. vmware made this much more error prone. I can make it more reliable by doing: sudo /etc/init.d/vmware stop. Of course need to start when coming out of hibernation. Does not hibernate when battery reaches critical, even though that is the settings in Power Management Preferences. Color depth 16 makes this extremely flaky. I've seen one occurrence where the USB mouse did not work after hibernation. Unplug and plugin again fixed it. Usually Network Manager also resumes wireless automatically, but if not, disabling and enabling wireless in NM makes it work again. Sometimes stops sound from working, haven't figured out how to re-enable without reboot.
Fn keys	Problems	Fn+CRT/LCD does not work. Once Fn+Hibernate has been used, Fn+Stand by and Fn+Hibernate stop working, but can still be invoked through menus (this is in effect until rebooted).
Xgl/Beryl	Works	After all the installation, remember to change default color depth to 24 in xorg.conf or this will not work.
Skype	Works	Works, but see above what needs to be done to get microphone (sound capture) working.
Virtual console	Works	To get Ctrl+Alt+F1-6 to work with nvidia driver need to add vga=791 option to kernel boot parameters, after splash (/boot/grub/menu.lst). Ctrl+Alt+F7 gets back to X.

Peripherals

External monitor	Problems	Fn+CRT/LCD does not work; need to restart X to get display into external monitor, and then it won't display on laptop monitor.
Projector	Problems	Fn+CRT/LCD does not work; need to restart X to get display into external monitor, and then it won't display on laptop monitor.
Samsung SPH-I300	Works	Had to do symlink: ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/pilot. And chmod 666 /dev/pilot. After that J-Pilot finds my Samsung SPH-I300 smartphone (PalmOS) and syncs ok. (Gnome Pilot sees the device, but gets stuck syncing.)
Logitech Webcam	Does not work	Added v4l in xorg.conf and plugged in the webcam. Ekiga could not detect camera. Wireless stopped working. Returned settings to where they were. I've read there are other approaches which I may try later.
UMAX Astra 3400 scanner	Does not work	The scanner is recognized and all, but scanning either does not work at all or works only partially. Typically I hear the scanner start scanning, then stop a couple of seconds later. Once I was able to scan about 1/4th of a page. Typically attempts seem to leave the scanner motor on, stuck on some point but still making noise.
Canon Optura 200MC	Problems	Installed kino, mjpegtools. Had to do sudo modprobe dv1394 before firewire was recognized. Had to start kino with gksudo kino before it detected camera. Could not export MPEG-1 (yuvdenoise: invalid option -- F) but MPGE-2 worked. Have only tried reading from tape via firewire.
Lexmark Z32	Problems	System > Administration > Printing, Add printer detected correct printer (well, z22-32). Had to specify that it is z32 explicitly. Went through options and set paper size to US Letter, otherwise defaults. Printed test page. Some problems on the test page: Grayscale, Red, Green, Blue don't match what I would expect (especially blue looks like violet). Greyscale and black have some color interference. Margins were off - started about 1 in from top and continued about 1 in on the second page. The two printer lights started blinking after print job finished. Tried to print Google search page, but it got stuck in queue. Canceled job, power cycled printer, tried Google search page again: now printed, but colors are way off, everything is somewhat blurred, only half of headers were printed, and no footers - all default Firefox settings. Printed the page in grayscale next, which was better but still blurred with some hints of color and again problems with headers and footers.
HP PhotoSmart C5180 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier	Works	Works with following driver settings: Manufacturer: HP; Model: PhotoSmart 3300; Driver: hpijs (recommended) - HPLIP 0.9.7 (Suggested). Update: The driver that comes with Dapper lets you print, but to scan I had to download and install hplib 1.7.4a.

Installation

Installation went without a hitch. Detected screen resolution automatically. Detected network card automatically. Detected and configured volume buttons automatically. Detected sound card automatically. Detected mouse pad, stick and buttons automatically...

Post installation

Needed to put in the security information for the wireless, after which it connected fine to my wireless router.

Installed software updates (179, phew).

Installed 686 smp kernel to get advantage of the Duo.

Added universe and multiverse repositories.

Installed network-manager-gnome to control wireless better. Although Network Manager works great, its documentation is practically nonexistent. Read https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/NetworkManager and http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/nm.shtml. Key points: comment out almost everything in /etc/network/interfaces because NM wants to control everything, and if you accidentally connect to a wireless network you need to use gconf-editor to remove the entry so that NM will not try to connect to it in the future. Actually gconf-editor is also confusing: you cannot remove a directory directly, you must delete all entries under a directory and next time you start gconf-editor the empty directory is gone.

Installed nvidia-glx. The instructions to enable it automatically did not work. Manually changed nv to nvidia in xorg.conf. Run nvidia-xconfig.

Installed xemacs. Select no mule support because of font problems.

Disabled system beep in sound options.

Installed Xgl. Installed Beryl. Change default color depth to 24 or things will not work. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/Xgl and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/InstallingBeryl (and maybe https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/InstallingCompiz).

Installed Eclipse-gcj-pydev.

Installed xserver-xephyr. Since I have to run with color depth 24 this is a bit much for broadcasting VNC demos. What I do instead is run a nested X server (Xephyr) which allows me to reduce the color depth for the display from which I am demoing. Xephyr :1 -ac -br -screen 1024x768x16/BPP&, metacity --display=:1&, DISPLAY=:1 gnome-terminal& and then doing the demo in the Xephyr window. It would be nice to run Gnome for the Xephyr window as well but haven't figured out how.

Installed gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg and gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 to enable playback of more formats, like MP3.

Changed fonts size to 9 from default 10.

Installed gcc, alien, linux-headers-686, xinetd.

Installed vmware server (downloaded rpm, converted to deb with alien --script -d). Run vmware-config.pl. Could not build vmware-cmd. Installed Windows XP Professional as guest. Note that you need to create custom virtual machine to create an IDE disk as the Windows installer does not detect the default.

Installed French and Spanish language support and set US English as the default language.

...

TODO

Investigate and try twinview (for second monitor and presentations):

• http://www.ublug.org/ubuntu/twinview/twinview-howto-breezy.html
• http://math.umh.ac.be/an/D820/#nvidia

Check IR:

• installed irda-utils
• sudo modprobe ircomm_tty

$ lsmod |grep ir
ircomm_tty             41352  0
ircomm                 24484  1 ircomm_tty
irda                  217980  2 ircomm_tty,ircomm
crc_ccitt               2240  1 irda

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=236497
• http://www.ailis.de/~k/docs/delld820/#irda
• http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/PalmOS-HOWTO.html
• http://howto.pilot-link.org/irdasync/eb.html

Firewire:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Firewire?highlight=%28firewire%29
• sudo modprobe dv1394

$ lsmod|grep 1394
dv1394                 21356  0
raw1394                31596  0
ohci1394               37524  1 dv1394
ieee1394              306520  4 dv1394,raw1394,sbp2,ohci1394

Things I Miss/Want

I want the computer to standby on lid close, and hibernate after an hour of standby. The options in the UI allow only to standby on lid close, and when on battery only, hibernate when battery on critical.

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on Dell Latitude D820

Had problems with networking at home so decided to try Edgy (specifically, it would see my wireless access point but would no longer connect to it no matter what I did). Networking didn't get better, but suspend and hibernate seemed to work much better, at least at first. Was using the xv driver. This had the problem that various actions (like enabing the screensaver) corrupted colors - redoing the action seemed to fix them.

After I switched to nvidia driver, installed xinitd, firestarter and maybe something else, suspend and hibernation went bad again. Set NvAGP^? 1 according to ubuntuforums advice, but this did not seem to help. Reverted to nv, uninstalled xinitd and firestarter, but still no luck. Maybe some of my personalization settings have broken this...

Found out that Flash plugin requires default color depth of 24 in xorf.conf, or it will crash every time.

Got home wireless working with an old Orinoco PCMCIA card. Tested that wired connection also works. Will not remember my home network (hidden AP with encryption) so I have to manually add that as new connection every time I start or come from suspension/hibernation.

Have also had several instanced of the system halting on startup. The repair mode almost always halts with the message: "BUG: soft lockup detected in CPU#0!".

Performance

My 3 year old Dell Inspiron 8500 with 5400 rpm drive (I think), 2 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, Windows XP takes about 5 minutes to run the Chandler functional tests. This Latitude runs them in 2 minutes 30 seconds on Windows XP, and in 2 minutes on Ubuntu. Applications work snappily. So pretty happy with what I guess I will be facing most of the time.

I am not happy with the Quadro card though. I started a 3DMark05 benchmark, but gave up almost immediately - the card is obviously not for games, and probably loses to mobile game cards from 3 years ago. glxgears -fullscreen gives 1022 frames in 5.0 seconds = 204.296 FPS.