The arrival of my new Dell D820 was not something which could be shadowed by the fact that I am sick with chickenpox for the last few days. So, almost in a good mood I decided to install the new Ubuntu Feisty Fawn which I downloaded in preparation a few days ago.

The system

DELL Latitude D820 with Intel Core 2 Duo at 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 100 GB HDD, 1680×1050 screen, nVidia GeForce Go 7400.

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)<br></br>00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)<br></br>00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)<br></br>00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)<br></br>00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01)<br></br>00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 01)<br></br>00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 01)<br></br>00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 01)<br></br>00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 01)<br></br>00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 01)<br></br>00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 01)<br></br>00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)<br></br>00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e1)<br></br>00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)<br></br>00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 01)<br></br>00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 01)<br></br>01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce Go 7400 (rev a1)<br></br>03:01.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. Cardbus bridge (rev 21)<br></br>03:01.4 FireWire (IEEE 1394): O2 Micro, Inc. Firewire (IEEE 1394) (rev 02)<br></br>09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)<br></br>0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)

Some history

I started with a Dell I8000 almost 7 years ago on which I first ran Mandrake then Debian and for the last 4 years Gentoo. 3 years ago I got a Dell I8600 on which I ran Gentoo until 6 months ago when I switched to Ubuntu Edgy.

Installation

I used the alternate i386 cd to install everything. It took 10 minutes and all worked smoothly. After installation it suggested me to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers which installed quickly. Not very nice to reboot your machine for that but simpler than to do everything by hand.

Sources

This time I did not even modified the /etc/apt/sources.list but instead I used the software sources application to add the universe, multiverse sources and remove the cdrom one.

Root password

Not a very big fan for sudo, just added a root password:

sudo passwd<br></br>... (first the "admin user" password is asked)<br></br>... then the root password is set<br></br>... and again<br></br>$ su -<br></br>#

Fancy desktop effects

Since this was one of the advertised new features in Feisty I tried the new fancy desktop effects as soon as possible. They worked ok but they did not seem much useful or anything so I disabled them shortly after playing 10 minutes with them. It seemed to me more useful to replicate the sloppy focus and double click to rollover effects with which I am so used from the WindowMaker years. I did not switched back to WindowMaker because in the months of using Edgy I have grown a bit on using a more advanced gui.

Sound

This was my greatest fear with this new laptop as it has a completely shity sound card (intel hda). Unfortunately this seem to be present in all laptops I have seen including the intel based mac.
I first tried to play a sound which worked ok but the sound quality is bad. As so many on the net say, I was happy at least it worked. Trying to record was another story. The default recorder behaved strangely at best and audacity which I installed complained about not finding any recording device at all. I lost about 1h trying to make it work by mixing information from the following threads which described similar problems:

Wireless

It worked without any effort, all the drivers where installed (using ipw3945) and clicking on the network manager icon showed me the networks to connect to. Talk about simplicity.

USB data storage

I am a bit disappointed as it seems there was a change from Edgy. I have an external hdd with 2 partitions (sda1 and sda2) which are mounted automatically in /media/sda1 and /media/sda2. In Edgy when I used the desktop icon to unmount one of the partitions both of them where unmounted. Now when I do that, there is an error and they are mounted again so I have to unmount them manually at the same time using the command:

umount /media/sda1 /media/sda2 as root

Photo camera

The Cannon PowerShot A95 worked as expected as it worked in Edgy also. It detects it and prompts for a place to save the images.

The service tag

You can use the i8k module to check your service tag, BIOS version, fan speed and so on

modprobe i8k<br></br>root@black:/# cat /proc/i8k <br></br>1.0 A06 XXXXXX 44 -22 1 27660 71250 -1 -22

Comments:

Coolvibe -

I had the same problem with the mic on my Latitude D520, which has exactly the same sound card.

My fix:

cat > /etc/modprobe.d/snd_hda_intel
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=ref
^D

Do a modprobe -a and reboot to make sure everything is loaded. Recording should work now.

Len -

There are 2 components as far as I know to make this wireless card work:
- the kernel module
lsmod | grep ipw
ipw3945 118816 1
ieee80211 34760 1 ipw3945
- and the daemon process

Once I had these 2 elements my iwconfig output was:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 unassociated ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency=nan kHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:0 kb/s Tx-Power:16 dBm
Retry limit:15 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:10 Missed beacon:0

irda0 no wireless extensions.

If it’s not the case you should check on ubuntuforums, there are lots of solutions to this type of problems there.

trev -

I have a thinkpad t61 but i have the same problem as Yonatan. Output is just like yours Marilen. Whats up?

Marilen Corciovei -

Is the daemon running? Something similar to:

root@black:/etc/init.d# ps -fu root | grep ipw
root 8392 11 0 09:22 ? 00:00:00 [ipw3945/0]
root 8394 11 0 09:22 ? 00:00:00 [ipw3945/1]
root 8395 11 0 09:22 ? 00:00:00 [ipw3945/0]
root 8396 11 0 09:22 ? 00:00:00 [ipw3945/1]
root 8476 1 0 09:22 ? 00:00:00 /sbin/ipw3945d-2.6.20-15-generic –quiet

Marilen Corciovei -

1. For me the wireless works using the ipw3945 module:
root@black:/home/len# lsmod | grep ipw
ipw3945 118816 1

2. For i8k you need to modprobe the i8k module

3. You are right the Fn F1 does not work for me either, I use the logout/suspend method.

Yonatan Feldman -

Hi,

My output from lsmod shows that I have the driver:

ieee80211 34760 1 ipw3945
ieee80211_crypt 7040 1 ieee80211
ipw3945 119328 0

But he output from iwconfig is:

[manolito:~] iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

[manolito:~]

How do I add the wireless interface?

Thanks,
yon.

Joseph Heled -

I have a new D820.

1. The wireless did not work out of the box. After several frustrating hours I found I need to blacklist the broadcom module and use ndiswrapper with the windows .inf that came with the machine. Other (downloaded) files did not work.

ndiswrapper -i /media/sda2/drivers/network/R140745/bcmwl5.inf

2. No i8k, how do I create it?

$cat /proc/i8k
cat: /proc/i8k: No such file or directory

3. Suspend/Sleep key (Fn F1) does not work. Suspending from the kubuntu “Log out” prompt aeem to work.

Randy J. Ray -

Have you tried getting suspend2 under Feisty, yet? Is there a repo somewhere akin to Trevino’s for Edgy?

Marilen Corciovei -

Yes I did tried. There is a trevino repository for feisty suspend2 kernels at: http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb/dists/feisty/index.html. I tried the same procedure as described in my Dell I8600 article with setting the repository, installing the sources and so on but I got stuck when recompiling the nvidia driver. I recompiled it ok but was not able to modprobe it into the new kernel. I guess I mixed up some of the sources or something.
I did not spend much time on it because the suspend to memory works perfectly and until I will hit the road it’s a good enough replacement which allows a much faster boot also.

Rick -

Interesting that you moved over from Gentoo to Ubuntu - any particular reason? - the only reason I ask is because I’m planning to install Gentoo on my D820 this weekend…

Marilen Corciovei -

I can say I was very much into Gentoo for some years and I had on my old laptop Gentoo for many years as I had Gentoo on some servers for the same amount of years.
First it was a question of commodity. If I install a server a week I prefer not to repeat the same process all over and I wish to spend as little as possible. Ubuntu install is very simple and does not require all the compile wait from Gentoo.
Also after a few years of gentoo the packages have changed a lot, some have disappeared, the profiles are no longer supported and since I don’t need to upgrade everything but only the security vulnerable applications I find myself sometime with packages which cannot be upgraded in an easy way or without a lot of other dependencies and lost time.
On the desktop side it was more or less the same problem, I only upgraded the packages I wanted and after 1-2 years I found I could not emerge world without loosing a weekend to compile, fix all compile dependencies and config merge problems so instead I installed ubuntu and went cycling.
Gentoo is great, but for me it has become too much maintenance which I felt it was better spent with other activities.
Currently from around 10 servers I only have one Gentoo remaining.