Dell Vostro 1320 and Kubuntu Hardy

[^rooker]

Hm. I was thinking of putting this in "bitching" rather than knowledge base, since Dell quite fucked up my day.

I wanted to order a 12" Inspiron Mini from Dell pre-installed with Ubuntu Hardy. The minute I ordered it, they took that model off their website and discontinued it - although I already had a valid order for it.

They were really cooperative on the phone and were helping me finding a suitable alternative: A Vostro 1320 with a 13" display, since I didn't want to have 15" or up.

I explicitely told them that I don't want any hardware hassle with Linux - and that I'm planning to use Hardy so I could expect some support from Dell (e.g. Dell-team PPA repositories, kernel drivers, etc). I checked all the components they've listed and told them that neither the wifi card, nor the graphics card, nor the gigabit ethernet (!!) NIC, nor the audio card seemed to be fluently supported under Linux.

Their reply was: "no, no. don't worry. you'll get all drivers you need from us".

Well. Long story short: Maybe I haven't found their Hardy-repositories supporting all these closed-proprietary-pieces-of-junk yet, or they by "everything's supported" they actually meant: "It's probably possible, if you compile everything yourself".

Long story short, here's my day:
1) Onboard Gigabit NIC: Realtek 8111/8168B:
The network interface eth0 showed up after a fresh install. Yeah! But it simply did not connect at all. DHCP was just running into a time-out.
Reason: It's loading the r8169 module which doesn't work with certain r8168 chipsets.

So I needed to download tar.gz archive from Realtek, but their website was down (my lucky day) - so I had to find it from somewhere else - and compile it. There were some strange problems with "invalid module format" when trying to "sudo modprobe r8168".

I don't know why, but I just had to manually copy src/r8168.ko to /lib/modules/2.6.24-24-generic/kernel/drivers/net/, because the one put there by "make install" differed (??wtf?) from src/r8168.ko. Whatever.

Then add the following line into /etc/modules:

Code: Select all

r8168

and blacklist the r8169 in "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

Code: Select all

blacklist r8169

2) The wireless adapter, Broadcom BCM4312 (as shown by "lspci"), is actually a 4315 (as shown by "lspci -nn") - which is at the moment *not supported* by the kernel driver for bcm43xx devices.

So I did the following:

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# Install the firmware loader for Broadcom 43xx devices:
apt-get install b43-fwcutter

That package has to download some license restricted, proprietary firmware from an external location, so you already need an internet connection to do that. That's great when neither your onboard nor your WLAN works !
Then some black magic voodoo happened, and it seems that a kernel module "wl" is now handling that device.


3) The Intel HDA soundcard worked out of the box!
Yeah, but.... only the output. There are *no* inputs showing up in alsa ?!
Still haven't figured out how to access the microphone input yet.
Playback is super-quiet by the way, but that seems to be a known issue for snd_intel_hda devices.

4) Video playback locks up the computer immediately.
Greaaat! And I thought "at least the graphic driver works without blood donations". Oh, btw: I must admit: The display is very very very crisp, sharp and bright. excellent image.
However, I can't play any video except youtube on that machine

[^rooker]

Great thanks to everyone working on the development of Free Software!

I've now used the PPA repositories from xorg-edgers to update my Xorg server to a more recent version, hoping that it would solve the video playback lockups - and it did!

It somehow fucked up my keyboard input and disabled vertedgescroll on the touchpad, but adding "AllowEmptyInput false" and "VertEdgeScroll on", seemed to do the trick.

Before I did that, I booted Jaunty live CD and verified that video playback works there.
btw: the onboard NIC as well as the Wireless card work out-of-the-box on that live distro. Strange, since the b43 linux wireless page says it's not supported.