After the initial boot of my shiny new Dell 1505n laptop, I started poking at it. The primary reason I got the machine was to look for issues that Ubuntu's users will face with it, so we can develop fixes quickly. Since I'd ordered this within hours of Dell first making their machines available, I probably got an early one right off the production line, so I found glitches pretty quickly. Likely by the time you read this, many of these problems will already be corrected in production. Fortunately, they all seem to be software issues; the hardware itself is solid and quite impressive.
My hope in giving visibility to these issues is to help ensure Dell's E1505n laptops are very strongly supported by the community. Dell shipping Linux systems and "releasing early" is a huge opportunity for us to demonstrate the power of the open source community at "making bugs shallow."
The laptop has a widescreen monitor, but the resolution was set to 1024x768, giving it a blurry, stretched out look. This is a commonly reported issue for Ubuntu, but I was surprised to see it on the factory model.
Anyway, the fix (well-reported on the forums) is:
sudo apt-get install 915resolution.
(We also have a specification entered for installing 915resolution by default with Intel graphics.)
Alan Pope reports an alternate fix:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
The -i810 driver is being obsoleted in favor of the -intel driver. The -intel driver is still relatively new, but is under very active development. Gutsy will be shipping both the -i810 driver and the -intel driver, but -i810 will probably be moved to legacy eventually.
After my first system update, an error occured on reboot: Error 17:
Unable to mount partition. Fortunately the issue was pretty
obvious to fix: Change the grub lines from [g]root (hd0,0) to
[g]root (hd0,2). This will be a tough issue for many people,
though, but fortunately it's a well
known issue.
Word is that this particular issue has already been fixed in the factory, so it's just us early, early adopters that have hit it. Sounds like Ubuntu may also be able to address it long term on their end.
For some reason, I couldn't get Ubuntu's GUI network tools to let me log onto my girlfriend's wireless network. I didn't see any other reports of trouble here in the Dell forums so maybe it's just me. Her laptop (a different model of Dell, also with Ubuntu Feisty on it) doesn't have this issue. However, I just hacked up a script to do it manually (I used to have to do this all the time when I used Gentoo):
#!/bin/bash
ESSID="SomeNetwork"
KEY="SOMEHEXKEY"
err() {
echo $1
exit 1
}
iwconfig eth1 essid $ESSID || err "Failed to set essid"
iwconfig eth1 key $KEY || err "Failed to set key"
iwconfig eth1 mode Managed || err "Failed to set mode"
ifup eth1 || err "Failed to ifup"
dhclient
I think for me the key was getting the mode set to Managed.
[Update] I ran into a similar problem on my home network, but I was able to get this to work through the GUI after adding the following to the end of /etc/network/interfaces:
auto wlan1 iface wlan1 inet dhcp
Then I restarted the network via /etc/init.d/networking
restart, selected my network, picked 'WEP 128-bit Hex Key',
and entered my hex key. It prompted me to save the key in 'nm' and then
logged me right on.
The laptop goes into suspend when I shut the lid, but getting it to come OUT of suspend has been a bit of a challenge. However, I found if I press the Fn+Hibernate button combo a few times, it'll eventually come back. Is this bumping it into hibernate mode and back? I need to do more testing.
Others on the Dell forums have reported that this works fine for them on 1505n. I did not experiment with suspend until after I'd upgraded, installed 915resolution, etc. so it's conceivable the issue is due to something I changed. At some point I'll reinstall from factory defaults and try tracking this down from scratch.
The system beep on the laptop (most noticeable if you're on the console), is exceptionally loud and distracting. There isn't an obvious switch to turn it down or off. It can be disabled though (thanks to Laudin Molina for the tip):
$ sudo su - # modprobe -r pcspkr #echo "pcspkr" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Another approach:
$ sudo -i
# echo "setterm -bfreq 0" >> /etc/bash.bashrc
I turned Compiz on and tinkered with it a bit. This was my first time using it on i810, so I was impressed it worked so easily. xrandr also worked really nicely, without issues I've encountered on nvidia and radeon hardware.
Wobbly windows worked perfectly, as did many of the other decorator
effects. I haven't gotten the cube working, yet. I also had some
trouble with annotate, in that the 'clear' shortcut wouldn't work, so I
could fill my screen with red scribbles but couldn't erase them. I
switched the shortcut to
When we look at doing composite-by-default we should make sure there is an easy way to get a listing of the current command shortcut keys; I know I can get them through gconf-editor, but that's way too technical for a typical user.
Having sufficiently kicked tires on the default install, I then upgraded the system to Gutsy. No real problems occurred here, except that the (hd0,0) problem mentioned above re-occurred - probably by whatever upgrades the kernel.
-- bryce at bryceharrington dot org