Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1501
I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 1501, which I got a great deal on thanks to the fine people at DealNews. The base system was $449 shipped, and I chose to upgrade the processor to dual AMD64s. But I didn’t buy the system that came with Ubuntu pre-installed; for whatever reason, the one that came with Windows offered a special discount (normally the Windows tax for otherwise identical machines appears to be around $150, and I’m certainly not going to run Windows).
Therefore, I was not sure Ubuntu would support all the hardware. It’s the same story it’s been for as long as I’ve been using computers: hardware manufacturers withhold specifications from the Free Software world, so there is always a chance something will be a trouble. The good news is, I’ve only noticed two very minor incompatibilities out of the box.
One is that the Fn+arrow keys won’t change my screen brightness, at least under XFCE. Strangely, my ancient Dell laptop had no trouble with that. I assume the old one was a hardware-controlled feature and this one needs some software support, but I could be wrong.
The other thing is the built-in wireless card, which isn’t supported with Ubuntu 7.04′s drivers out of the box. However, I quickly found a set of drivers for the Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 card, and was up and running shortly thereafter. The only thing I had to do after installing the drivers was press the Fn+F2 key, which turns the card on.
Otherwise everything works brilliantly.
And now for a rant: click through to that page about the drivers, and you’ll see an example of what I consider the Ubuntu sudo disease. There’s even a screenshot of someone typing sudo uname -a and using sudo to remove a file he didn’t create with sudo. I think unfortunately, Ubuntu’s policy of allowing one to run any command with sudo has created a crop of people who don’t understand what should and shouldn’t be privileged; some of them seem to believe that ‘sudo’ is what you type at the beginning of every command. It completely defeats the purpose and circumvents the security gained by not running as root. For my part, when I want to administer my system, I become root, do what I need to do, and then quit again. I rarely sudo any command other than sudo su -.
But that’s just me.
I understand when to use sudo, but it became some kind of bad habit to use it a little too often.
Anyway, criticism can be good. Remove the unnecessary sudos.
BlackNight
25 Jul 07 at 3:22 am
Yes, it is hard for it not to become a habit, isn’t it? When every administrative command starts with sudo, it becomes like a little song in your head. That’s when I started to realize it was taking over my brain, and started doing ‘sudo su -’ so I wouldn’t accidentally do something dumb like start my web browser with sudo! By the way, I didn’t mean to criticize you, I meant to criticize Ubuntu for just making everything sudo-able.
Xaprb
25 Jul 07 at 6:29 am
I too started using ‘sudo su’, but for tutorials, guides, etc I keep using plain sudo, because most Ubuntu users (many of them no quite linux gurus :D) don’t know what’s sudo su supposed to do.
Now, don’t misunderstand me, I have no problem with the non-geek Ubuntu users, nor with Ubuntu (great distro, BTW), but it is the choice of many beginners, who lack linux know-how.
BlackNight
25 Jul 07 at 10:29 am
instead of ‘sudo su’ you could type ‘sudo -i’ (‘i’ is for interactive). But I avoid that, instead I run a root shell tab in Konsole, and give it a distinctive color scheme, helping me remain aware when I’m working as root.
dr.bob
26 Jul 07 at 6:37 pm
Overuse of sudo has one advantage that has helped me while sharing sysadmin duties with a co-worker: audit trail. I can examine the logs to see what command he used with sudo.
Dane
30 Jul 07 at 2:37 pm
Great point Dane. I have never really thought about auditing. Are there any other ways to log every command a root shell executes?
Xaprb
30 Jul 07 at 10:21 pm
Try to ‘sudo -s’ instead of ‘sudo su -’. Anyway ‘su’ is a bad idea. I home some day Fedora will move change it’s ideology from ‘su’ to ‘sudo’.
artiomix
7 Aug 07 at 5:48 pm
I have another Linux guide for the Dell Inspiron 1501 here:
http://www.linlap.com/wiki/Dell Inspiron 1501
Bill
8 Aug 07 at 12:11 pm
Did you ever get your screen brightness keys to work? Mine don’t work either and neither do my speaker volume or mute keys.
Alex
19 Aug 07 at 10:35 am
No. I found some discussion of it on the web that made it sound like an Ubuntu problem — I guess earlier Ubuntu versions worked OK and this should be fixed in the next release.
Xaprb
20 Aug 07 at 8:09 am
On my laptop, the [Fn] [Arrow] brightness keys are reversed. (The key that indicates a brighter screen makes it dimmer, and vice versa.)
But that’s okay, because I think they should be switched anyway. :-)
Tim McCormack
4 Sep 07 at 9:23 pm