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800

Give me a Linux Latitude! (D630, if only one...)

800 points posted to Latitude products, Linux by lordxale 05/25/07

The D620 is a great machine. The D630 is an even greater machine. When dedicated graphics are finally offered on it, I'll be buying one as soon as I can. However, I am also a Linux user. The options for getting rid of Windows on any of the Latitudes are unattractive at best. If I could either buy without Windows or, even better, buy one with Ubuntu 7.04 preloaded, I would be ecstatic.

To me, it makes little difference other than price. I will likely install my own Linux distro anyway (Kubuntu, in fact), but I would love to support Ubuntu any way I can, or just not pay any MS tax. I'll certainly need to dual boot it with Windows for some apps I can't get away from (games only!), but I've got a Vista Business license waiting for it, so I won't need to pay MORE for another one I won't need. Surely there must be many others in the same boat I am! Lucky for you, Dell, I'm a diehard Latitude fan - a D630 will be my 4th; even if it came with WinME I would still buy it. But, I digress...

Give me a Linux Latitude!

mistern
05/25/07		 Sure. But some patience might be good as well.
phish
06/05/07		 Same for me, but I'd like the d830 instead :-).
lordxale
06/05/07		 Well, hopefully, we won't have to choose a side. I would imagine that the D630 and D830 share enough components to where if they were to drop the hammer on Linux for them I'd assume they'd both be supported at launch.

The D531 and 131L (the horrible inspiron in latitude paint) I would assume will not see Linux during their lifespans because of their integrated ATI video.
jmxz
06/07/07		 +1 - but too late for me.

I would have rather had the D630 - and Dell could have gotten more $ out of me if they had a D630 with an OS I know how to use.

But they didn't so I got the E1505N.
bisho
06/18/07		 I would like to see ubuntu on D820/D830 too!!!

WUXGA rulez!
tpischke
06/25/07		 Yup, Would like to see Ubuntu on any platform featuring the x3100 graphics card, and especially the Latitude line.

Or even a Free-Dos version of the 630, 830 would be OK. Then I can install gutsy on my own.

Waiting to buy a laptop until I can get Santa Rosa, and that's not possible in the current inspiron line-up. Latitudes are also just plain better.
mistern
06/25/07		 tpischke: Don't use ATI graphics card with Linux.
ssvda
06/30/07		 +1024

Please, do it! Latitude ATG with Linux will good too!)))
eshook
07/30/07		 We ordered 3 Dell D630's and installed Ubuntu on them last week. If Ubuntu were offered we would have purchased them, even at a slightly higher cost. It would be great to have the OS pre-installed instead of having to install, configure, update, etc.

We will be purchasing Optiplex's soon and would like to have an Ubuntu option for them as well. Unfortunately the current Ubuntu offerings (home based PC's) don't hold up in a University environment where the machines are heavily used.
lordxale
07/31/07		 Well, in the last 3 weeks, I've not only bought and received a WinXP-Home based D630, I've also had a video card die, gotten a replacement machine, and had the second one's video card die, as well. As any of you reading this have probably guessed, yes, I ordered the new Quadro 135M in my D630. I'm not sure why they both failed - the first one seemed to have wicked framebuffer issues because it wouldn't post and had really strange color bars on half the screen and nothing on the other half. On the second one the digital output to the screen seemed to have died - it would work with an external analog monitor, but when you looked in the BIOS it said unknown device/ 0x0 pixels under Display Info. If you closed the screen while it was running and attached to an external monitor, when you opened it again you would have a very garbled double image of whatever was going on. No amount of switching displays with the FN hotkey did anything.

I hope my incidents are isolated matters, but alas, I can hardly believe I got two dead Quadros in a row - the first one lasted a week and the second one made it 3 days. I returned my D630 and am in the process of getting my money back. I bought another battery for my c840 and I'm limping along with that. I'll probably get another one in a few months, or maybe I'll venture out and get a Vostro...

...but my D630 was a beautiful, solid, amazingly fast machine when I had it!
bk
08/23/07		 Dell should ensure that suspend/resume works before shipping a configuration with Linux. Here is a report of suspend issues from an Ubuntu-preinstalled

http://www.starryhope.com/dell/2007/review-dell-inspiron-1420n-with-ubuntu/< far as I could find using my favourite search engine, suspend does not work quite right on the D630 and the similar (except for display size) D830:

Dell's BIOS fails to start the 3nd CPU core after suspend on a D830:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/133530


Suspend not working:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/redfish/+bug/123104


I'd say that Dell should ensure that those models which it sells or wants to sell with Ubunutu should get
some more testing, before they are shipped with Linux. 3D and suspend (hibernate and standby) should really work when you ship things:

http://www.starryhope.com/dell/2007/review-dell-inspiron-1420n-with-ubuntu/


From what I hear from Linux on Thinkpads, working suspend is a given there and after I have seen that suspend does not even work on the pre-installed notebooks which Dell shipped with Ubuntu, and that suspend is really a requirement for me, I must say that Dell is not an option to look at for my next notebook any longer. The D830 notebook would have been nice, but as suspend does not work on it flawlessy, I'll be very cautious and will look for alternatives elsewhere (Thinkpads are well-known to have reliable working suspend and standby here) until I know that the suspend issues have been fixed on the D830.
bk
08/23/07		 Here is a forum thread of network and sound issues after suspend:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=481651&page=8


German forum thread which sayse there are problems with the D830:
http://groups.google.com/group/de.comp.os.unix.linux.hardware/msg/35a79c88a4f...

The D830 would have been my laptop but without working suspend' I'm not buyiung, Thinkpads are known to work well with suspend)
jmxz
08/23/07		 In Dell's defense, my nVidia powered Ubuntu-pre-installed E1505N had both hibernate and suspend working fine out of the box - with the default nv driver that it came with.

Enabling the nvidia driver made the screen stay black on unsuspend, tho. But IMHO that's not Dell's fault but rather nVidias.
bk
08/25/07		 Merged Idea originally posted 03/22/07
Dim Light for the Keyboards

Sure it's not Dell's vault, but with an Intel GPU, you'd have got longer battery life, less heat and fan noise,
    and suspend working with 3D!

    It's also nothing new that suspend tends to be broken with the NVIDIA an ATI blobs (binary large objects, this is what the open source driver developers which reverse-engineer ATI and NVIDIA drivers call the ATI and NVIDIA drivers), so if fact, Dell could have known that it might be better to use Intel graphics right from the start.

    PS: It was very frustrating that the Latitude D830, while having the new fast Santa Rosa technology with the brand-new fast Intel GMA X3100 GPU, has a broken ACPI BIOS, so resume does not work: (it's not a single report, I have seen the error message from the kernel where it shows that the BIOS failed to restart the 2nd CPU core on resume). Otherwise it could have been potential buy for me if id had Linux support.

    PPS: The only alternative in Dell's product line - (everything else got AIT or NVIDIA graphics ONLY), the XPS 1330M, would have been an alternative, had it a matte, non-reflective display:

    http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=92



    BTW: This comment has not been merged from "Dim Light for the Keyboards", if that is shown above, it's a BUG in the web software.
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