tuxmaniac’s blog

I got my Dell XPS M1210 a week back. Have been busy setting things up on the new laptop to make it fully usable again. Man, setting up things afresh can make you go crazy. Especially with 2 years of software customisations that my old lappie had. But all is well that ends well. I got the laptop, opened it up and pressed the power button. Here come Windows Vista. I decided to give it a try for a day or two. It took 15 minutes for the system to finish initial settings. Then I wandered around the WoW experience. Ok, ‘Nuff done I went ahead to configure the internet. Since mine was a static IP I tried to figure out where to specify this. I couldnt find it. Also it kep asking me some username or password and I didnt have one for my ISP. Darn!!! the GUI was not at all intuitive and some pop up or the other was coming here and there. I thought I have had enough, put in the Ubuntu Edgy Live CD I had and off I went. 5 minutes I was into the Desktop and on IRC . Installed edgy since I did not have a Blank CD and at that time of the day no shops are open. So wiped Vista clean. Yes, Vista was nuked in straight 45 minutes.

Feisty Fawn was installed the next day and everything did go well. I love the laptop’s compactness. I am not so convinced with the Keyboard though. A short report on whats working and whats not below.

Intel Core 2 Duo processor - Works.

Sound - Worked only sometimes initially. But then I figured out that the system was not able to take the correct sound card since mine had two. Setting the default card manually by “asoundconf set-default-card Intel” worked.

Wireless - Its a 3495 and works out of the box on Feisty using the restricted driver ipw3495. (Special Note: Am extemely happy with this chipset. I have never had better Wifi Experience before. Hail Intel!!)

Bluetooth - Works. Needs the gnome-bluetooth and bluez-utils packages for more fun.

Widescreen - 915resolution package did the work. Am satisfied with a 1280 * 800 resolution.

Ethernet Card - Works.

Card Reader - SD Card works like a charm. Have not tried MMC card.

CD/DVD Writer - Works

Firewire - Not tried

Internal Modem - Not tried.

Touch Pad - Works.

Special Keys on the front - Works.

Webcam - Works with Ekiga as of now using the v4l2. Needs the linux-uvc drivers. For more info check Linux-UVC Project page.

Battery - Its a 9cell battery. Backsup stuff for me for around 4.5 - 5 hrs on normal usage (no kernel builds going, just browsing and documentation along with some music and video playback)

Did I miss out anything???

Photoset on myFlickr.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 9:09 am and is filed under FLOSS, ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.