Ubuntu 8.10 rocks my Inspiron 1501
I’m really really happy about Ubuntu 8.10 because it lets me stop kicking myself so much for buying a Dell Inspiron 1501. This little laptop was the el-cheapo option for me, found via dealnews.com. I was going to buy the virtually identical one that came with Ubuntu installed, but then Dell offered a deal on the 1501, which had Windows Vista, and I caved in to the allure of saving about $200.
Of course I promptly discovered that the two most important differences between the models involved hardware for which no good Free Software drivers existed: the video card and the wireless card. The Inspiron 1501 has a “ATI Technologies Inc RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200M]” and a “Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)”.
I use dual monitors; it’s pretty much a necessity for me. And I just couldn’t get the radeon driver to work right with them. I spent a lot of time trying. I ended up going to the ATI driver, which is proprietary; it had its own issues with mouse pointer corruption and the lot, which eventually were fixed, but it still disabled suspend/resume, and plus it’s non-Free. My colleagues know this irked me — they just heard me griping about it a few days ago.
But now, praise be, the radeon driver works with my dual monitors! And the drag-and-drop point-and-click configuration interface works, too! I’ve got a 1680×1024 external monitor, positioned above my 1024×800 laptop display, and I have never so much as peeked at /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Thanks to all the people who worked so hard on this! (It didn’t work flawlessly until I rebooted, but who’s complaining.) Suspend/resume now work great!
I haven’t gotten the wireless card working yet; the bw43-cutter package seems to have disappeared. But I’m actually hoping that I won’t need proprietary drivers for this, too.
Well, enjoy your experience! :-)
opi
1 Nov 08 at 11:23 am
If Ubuntu ever gets the wireless problems solved, they will have a very polished product. I was hoping that the broadcom driver on the 1501 would be recognized in 8.10 but it was not. I am sure there will be a solution soon. Thanks for the article.
Jorge
1 Nov 08 at 3:08 pm
It was really worth it to get a laptop with Linux pre-installed. I bought a System76 laptop (the Pangolin Performance with Intel wireless and video. It cost me $1300, including the 3-year warranty, and I haven’t had to wrangle with the configuration at all.
There are of course a few hardware-related bugs, but the decision to go with pre-installed has saved me a lot of time. Make sure you like the OS though! A friend of mine bought a Thinkpad with SUSE, and she hates it. We’ll be putting Ubuntu 8.10 on it as soon as we get it backed up.
Tim McCormack
1 Nov 08 at 4:05 pm
Here is what I did to fix the wireless issue in 1501
First install any updates using the update manager or command line
1. Connect your laptop to the Internet using your Ethernet port
2. Click System-> Administration-> Hardware Drivers
3. Let it search for the Broadcom drivers
4. Activated drivers
5. Once installed, click the network icon and choose connect to hidden network
6. The rest is self explanatory
Hope this helps
Jorge
1 Nov 08 at 6:30 pm
I was happy to see the new Atheros drivers in the new kernel, so I’m not using any bad drivers. If I want fancy 3D graphics I’ll have to do something with my nVidious card, but I just don’t care about that stuff right now. I did notice that in 8.10 I no longer have some of the buggy interface problems that I had with 8.04.
Also, I updated both of my systems today, and I had no issues with the update at all. Very smooth.
Nathaniel
1 Nov 08 at 11:54 pm
I didn’t upgrade, I reinstalled. I decided to switch to 32-bit. This laptop has a max RAM capacity of 2GB, so there is zero benefit to having 64-bit installed. I wanted to get away from some of the hassles of working around packages that aren’t available for 64-bit, (mostly proprietary things) and at the same time save more of my limited RAM on pointer sizes. So far it’s all going smoothly.
Xaprb
2 Nov 08 at 8:21 am
@Xarpb:
Actually the 1501 works great with 4GB of RAM, I’m running Intrepid x64 and can see and use all the RAM (I dual-boot with XP x64, as well, and it sees all the RAM).
Christopher
3 Nov 08 at 8:46 pm
It’s really good, I istalled Ubuntu 8.10 on my Dell Inspiron 1520 and it work very well. My congratulation!
Alex Berber
7 Nov 08 at 9:06 am
Hello, I have the same video card (ATI Xpress 200m) and I am struggling to get dual monitors working on 8.10. Could you tell me where you got the radeon driver and how you got it to work?
Thanks in advance,
John
John
1 Dec 08 at 4:34 pm
P.S. I have the same wireless card working, I will post the steps I got to get the free drivers working (and they actually work better!)
John
1 Dec 08 at 4:40 pm