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Dell Inspirion 1100 Specs

This is not a new model, but anyways, here are the specs.

* Chipset and Controllers:* Intel® 82801DB (ICH4)
* Nic:* Broadcom 4400 10/100BaseT Ethernet
* Drive:* Fujitsu MHT2030AT, 30GB
* Optical Disk:* Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-C2612
* On Board Graphic:* Intel 845G
* On Board Sound:* Intel 82801DB-ICH4 with STAC9750,51
* Modem:* inactivated
* Monitor:* build in, no external monitor used

The Installation

I downloaded both CDs via BitTorrent [1]. For some strange reason my laptop would not boot with them (my desktop did). So I downloaded the DVD and now it worked.

I knew beforehand that the installer will have problems with the Inspirion 1100 screen, and read up on this problem. One suggestion was to use the alternative installer. It didn’t work. The installation ended at some point with a blank screen with two white squares.

Somewhat annoyed I used the desktop installion via the live CD version which worked well. The whole ordeal was a little cumbersome since the screen resolution was a mere 640 x 480 pixels. Once the height of technology (my first laptop had a screen resolution of the exact same size), but now really not usable. The installation screens are slightly larger, which doesn’t help either. Anyways, I kept going.

I worked through all the sections, decided to repartition my harddrive since it had some strange setup from the time when I was running a dual boot system. Interestingly enough, I could not choose ReiserFS as my filesystem. During the text based install this was possible. Makes me wonder if that was the reason the installation didn’t work. I selected ext3 instead. No big deal. All went well and the system rebooted.

Fixing the Video Resolution

The first thing to do after the initial boot was the video resolution fix. It is rather simple if one knows how to do it [2].

The following needed to be done in a terminal window:

1) Make a copy of your xorg.con file
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.custom

2) Not sure why this has to be done…
sudo sh -c ‘md5sum /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /var/lib/x11/xorg.conf.md5sum’

3) Now let Kubuntu reconfigure the graphic card/monitor.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

The last step will go through the detection and setup of the display. All the parameters have been correctly detected by the script and I could simply agree to every suggested solution. Why did it not work the first time around? Once all steps had been completed, X needed to be restarted (Ctrl + Alt + Backspace).

After the login screen came up again, the resolution was set to 1024 x 768 px. I did not install any additional packages, things worked without it. So far so good.

Updating and Installing Software

Since I am not used to the Debian installation system I had to read up on how to use Adept correctly. After a couple of tries I figured out how to add new repositories and activate the preset ones. It actually does help to read the manual _cough_. All the needed information was available via the Kubuntu help, just a click away when you open the KDE menu.

I let Kubuntu update itself with all the security fixes and whatever else needed to be updated and installed. That worked really well, and I must say faster than the SUSE version of the same procedure. So thumbs up for Kubuntu here.

I realized that KDE was still version 3.5.2. So I searched for the repository and updated this also [3].

What Worked out of the Box

Most things on this laptop worked out of the box. Sound was there, loud and clear. The wired network was established without any extra work. After selecting the Dell Laptop keyboard in the Systems Settings area, extra keys worked also (sound volume, monitor brightness, etc). USB sticks are mounted without a problem (I have one from LG).

Wireless LAN worked out of the box. What a sweet surprise. Both of my PCMCIA cards worked without any special setup. My cards are: Netgear WG511T (Atheros Chipset) and Linksys WPC11 v4 (RTL8180 Chipset). Although the Linksys card supports up to 128bit WEP encryption, this does not work under Linux (yet). The Netgear card does, but the WEP key has to be entered in HEX mode, not as a string. Using the Wireless Assistant makes this a breeze.

What Needs Tweaking

If you want to listen to MP3 files you have to install some extra libraries, you might want to install lame also, since you’ll need it to make your own MP3s. Activate the restricted repositories in Adept.

Watching commercial movies is unfortunately something that is legally not supported under Linux (at least in some countries). You will have to install the libdvdcss2 library in order to watch your (hopefully) legally owned movies. If you are on it get the w32codecs also. Resource [4] will explain how to do that and where to get the needed files.

The font rendering needed some help. SUSE definitively had a much better font rendering out of the box. But this could be fixed easily. Resource [5] explains it all.

The Verdict

So far I’m very happy with Kubuntu on my laptop. Everything important for me just works, including WLAN. I can use either one of my cards, switch them on a whim. I wish it would have worked like that in SUSE. WLAN used to work well in SUSE, but after the last 2 Kernel security updates things changed for the worst. I could not make my cards work at all without the use of ndsiwrapper, and even then it was very flaky. The network would not come up again after the card was pulled out and then plugged in again. Given your card is supported under Linux in the first place, going online wireless is now just as easy as it is when you are using a MAC or Windows laptop.

The responsiveness of the laptop seems to have improved quite a bit (this is not backed by some scientific measurements, these are subjective impressions). It’s harddrive is rather slow, simple things like deleting files from the trashbin could take a minute or so under SUSE 10.1, now this is back to normal again (1-2 seconds max). Nice.

I still like SUSE a lot, I use it since version 7.2 and I know it quite well. Unfortunately, it became rather annoying on my laptop, so I decided to switch. All the issues that have been so pestering (slowness, no wlan) are non-existent on my desktop system so I will continue using SUSE there. In the end it’s all Linux anyways and it never hurts to be familiar with more than one Linux distro.

Resources

[1] Kubuntu Downloads
[2] Fix Video Resolutio Howto
[3] Get KDE 3.5.4
[4] libdvdcss2 and w32codecs for Ubuntu
[5] HOWTO: quickly improve X11 font rendering