October 03, 2004
Ubuntu vs Dell Inspiron 8100
Final score, Ubuntu 1, Inspiron 0.
As some of you have heard me lament in the past, my laptop hates Linux. There are problems even booting most installers, because of some PCMCIA weirdness, and those that do boot often struggle with the 1400×1050 screen resolution. And while the wireless card can be coerced into working, with a little help from the ACX100 project, there's not a chance in hell it'll be available during the install process, for net installs.
So imagine my surprise, when I tried installing Ubuntu! It booted first time (though I did get asked if there were any PCMCIA port ranges I wanted to exclude from probing — the installer help even told me which ports I was likely to want at this point, if any, and got it right), and the wireless card was available during the install process (although I didn't use it). The screen resolution Just Worked — hell, I've not even seen the X config file on this box yet, whereas normally I have to spend an eternity tweaking it to get things working. I just haven't needed to care. In fact, I don't even know if I'm running XFree86's or Xorg's xserver...
Once it was up and running, I was impressed with the slick interface, too. I've not really made serious use of GNOME before (I think the last time was on a machine in Comlab almost 3 years ago) but it seems to do all I need. Everything is nicely integrated; my default browser is already set up as firefox, which made a pleasant change; OpenOffice.org is already set up and ready to go. Even 'sudo' was already configured and working, something I've thought Linux distros should do more for a while now. Oh, and (after editing about 4 characters in /etc/apt/sources.list) "apt-get install $package" works for any package that's currently in Debian unstable. Which includes gtetrinet :)
So given that all my hardware Just Works, and stuff from 3rd party debian repositories also seems to work well, I think I might be close to changing my mind about Linux's readiness for the average desktop. Maybe it's even time to install it on my main desktop again...
[Update: on the off chance that people find this through Google while trying to install Linux on a similar laptop, the magic phrase in the PCMCIA config options is "exclude port 0x800-0x8ff" — the Ubuntu installer actually suggests this as a likely option, but if you've not had this issue before you wouldn't necessarily know it was right.]
Posted by James at 10:27
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Comments
I've got an inspiron 8100 as well, i've never had any pcmcia probs though. I was curious if you have had problems with the mouse in ubuntu? mine seems to "glitch" or stutter sometimes. Also how has your experiance with Hibernate gone? i think mine stopped working after installing the nvida drivers, considering i never do any 3d stuff on the laptop i think i will re-format and leave the nvidia drivers out.
Posted by: knotquiteawake at May 19, 2005 09:03 PM
I've not had too many problems with the mouse under ubuntu, except that occasionally it will completely freeze; the rest of the system works fine, via the keyboard, but the mouse is frozen. I think this is to do with a broken connection inside the machine, more than anything, though.
As for hibernation, I'm afraid I've never used it, sorry!
Posted by: James at May 20, 2005 11:01 AM