Notes from the Field: Installing Fedora 9 on a Dell Latitude D630

-
My employer has given me a Dell Latitude D630 notebook. It comes with a 2.4GHz T7700 processor, 2GB memory, wireless, and an nVidia Quadro NVS 135M video card. The system initially came with Windows XP SP2 installed (since upgraded to SP3). As delivered and configured it worked like a charm.

Part of my job is developing and supporting applications running on RHEL 4. I decided to install Fedora 9 on this machine, and here are some of the reasons:
  • Support out-of-the-box for whole-drive encryption (remember this is a laptop)
  • VPN support out-of-the-box
  • Contemporary UI (Gnome 2.22) compared to that found on RHEL 4
  • It's the only Linux distribution outside of RHEL that is officially sanctioned by my employer
Rather than monkeying with the initial XP install, I ordered a blank drive for the Dell and swapped it in for the XP drive. That gave me a clean system with which to install Fedora 9 on and a fallback to get back to work. Here's what worked immediately after the Fedora 9 installation on the blank drive:
  • Drive encryption/decryption (I could log in)
  • Wired networking
  • Full screen resolution (1440 by 900) with 'free and open' driver but no 3D support
  • Local mouse
  • Every USB device I currently have
Here's what worked after installing Livna as a repository:
  • nVidia native driver with 3D support
  • Flash version 9
Here's what is broken after initial install and some simple googling for possible answers:
  • Wireless (Broadcom 4328 802.11n draft)
  • Audio
Since I have a wired connection I can perform what I need to do with regards to networking. Audio isn't a show stopper (yet). It's odd to see Flash video without the sound, and before you ask, if the sound system is broken then nothing else that depends on it will work, so 'fixing' Flash isn't the answer. I haven't tried VPN yet, as I haven't had a need. And since everything I'm concerned with is written in Java (Java 6) I'm not concerned with other issues such as gcc version clash.

Fundamentally the system is functional and will probably allow me to get my core job done. But it falls a bit short as a shining light for Linux adoption.

So I wonder what excuses/flames I'll get for these problems.

Update

Mis-identified the wireless chip set. ndiswrapper failed to solve the problem.

Comments

  1. BrendonAugust 03, 2008

    You said that your employer only officially sanctions Fedora (outside of redhat).
    Why don't they sanction CentOS?

    ReplyDelete
  2. BillAugust 03, 2008

    I don't know, but considering that I've only been there for exactly eight weeks so far, I have to live with the sanction.

    I booted the Live CD versions of openSUSE 11.0 and Ubuntu 8.04.1 just as an experiment, and those distributions failed to detect the wireless and audio on that notebook as well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. snakewoodAugust 13, 2008

    Bill, did you get your wireless working yet? I am having trouble with Fed9 on a D620. See my travails on my (new) blog at http://adventures-in-tuxland.blogspot.com/2008/08/no-wifi-on-my-fed9-system.html.

    Rob

    ReplyDelete
  4. BillAugust 13, 2008

    No, I did not. It was also still broken as of Fedora 10 alpha 1.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

All comments are checked. Comment SPAM will be blocked and deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

A Decade Long Religious Con Job

-
Image
I rarely write inflammatory (what some might call trolling) titles to a post, but this building you see before you deserves it. I've been seeing this building next to I-4 just east of Altamonte/436 and Crane's Roost for nearly 12 years, and never knew who owned it. Today on a trip up to Lake Mary with my wife I saw it yet again. That's when I told her I wanted to stop by on the way back and poke around the property, and photograph any parts of it if I could. What I discovered was this still unfinished eighteen story (I counted) white elephant, overgrown with weeds and yet still under slow-motion construction. It looks impressive with its exterior glass curtain walls, but that impression is quickly lost when you see the unfinished lower stories and look inside to the unfinished interior spaces. A quick check via Google leads to an article written in 2010 by the Orlando Sentinel about the Majesty Tower. Based on what I read in the article it's owned by SuperChannel ...
Read more

Ten Reasons to Ignore Ten Reasons to Dump Windows and Use Linux

-
There is a tradition amongst the hard-core Linux aficionados to extol Linux's various virtues as a list of 10 or more reasons to substitute (as in "dump") an existing Windows installation with Linux. There's no reason to point them all out; a simple Google search (" 10 reasons to use Linux ") will provide you with such lists stretching back through the years, as well as hours of entertainment. One very recent list caught my eye over the weekend, published by PCWorld. Their article, " Ten Reasons to Dump Windows and Use Linux ", seems to have hit a nerve with me. Normally I just ignore such journalistic pap, since the majority of it comes courtesy of one ill-informed blog or another (such as this one). But in this instance a "real" publication put some time and journalistic "credibility" into this list, which places it in front of a wider audience than the typical blog poist (again, such as this one). So let's consider al...
Read more

Former Eclipse user re-evaluates Eclipse 3.3M5

-
Image
I've been using NetBeans for a while now, starting with version 4.2 in beta. One of NetBeans' key selling points (in my not-so-humble-opinion) is Java GUI building with Matisse . That feature continues to be quite powerful and unrivaled, especially for a free-as-in-beer IDE. I even wrote a lovely paean to the wonders of NetBeans and why I moved away away from Eclipse to NetBeans . Now, it looks like I may have to eat some of those tastefully written words. What you're looking at above is a complete Ruby on Rails project hosted and running within Eclipse 3.3 Milestone 5 on Windows XP. Milestone 5 was released this past Friday, February 9th. I installed it Saturday, and then went on a plugin hunt to fill out additional features and capabilities. Why did I decide to re-install Eclipse, especially a milestone? So that I could get a complete integrated development and test capability in one convenient package for Ruby on Rails. Like a lot of other folks I've been playing ...
Read more