Ubuntu Wiki

* Contact: KevinKubasik

• Brand: Dell
• Make : Latitude
• Model: D820

• Website: http://www.dell.com

• S/N: Only needed if you have a Canonical supplied laptop

Current Issues

Wireless support is sketchy at best, ndiswrapper will crash with the current nvidia driver, and the bcm34xx driver is very slow.

System Info

bios-version:A06
system-manufacturer:Dell Inc.
system-product-name:Latitude D820
system-version:Not Specified

Hardware details

|| || in Dapper ? || in Edgy ? || in Feisty? || in Hardy?

Notes

Sleep and hibernate

Sleep and hibernate are sketchy using the default kernel and defalt tools (gnome-power-management). THis may be due to a bug in the usb subsystem; apparently the usb hubs do not always suspend properly when the usb modules ehci_hcd and ohci_hcd are loaded. These problems can be dealt with more easily using the hibernate package and a self-compiled kernel with the suspend2 patches applied. Compiling your own kernel on ubuntu is a little tricky because of the way that linux-restricted-modules is packaged; while there are good instructions for compiling your own kernel package, it's not obvious how to do the restricted modules, and this laptop requires the ipw3945 firmware which is not included in the main kernel package. So you have to do a bit more than usual. Fortunately there are debian packages for ipw3945 now, and well as for ipw3945d, so you can use these in conjunction with a debian kernel 2.6.18 and suspend2 patch 2.2.8 -for-2.6.18, or (hopefully) with a git-based kernel tree that pulls from both the main Linus tree and Nigel Cunningham's suspend2 tree. Instructions on this to follow in a few days (hectic now).

The one bug that persists despite some work is the use of the microphone; alsamixer will not allow me to turn it on Not sure how this might be improved. -- MattPrice

Configuring X

The nv driver works out of the box on this laptop in feisty, but some functions may require the nnonfree nvidia driver. One setup can be found in ["nvidia-xorg.conf" this file] which you can copy and paste at will.

* 3d accelation and compositing. Currently no Free solution for this with nvidia graphics card. Instructions for installing nvidia are available at various placeso n the wiki, installing linux-restricted-modules may be enough at this point, but I installed nvidia's driver by hand using the instructions on nvidia'swebsite. it wasn't all that hard. Certain options need to be set in the device section to make compiz, beryl, or metisse work with nvidia.

* Use of external monitor/projector. This appears to require nvidia, though i'd be happy if someone proved me wrong. In the attached [ "nvidia-xorg.conf" ] the external vga port is enabled using twinview. I currently (feb 13 20070 find it a little bit buggy and am working on improvements. Twinview, which extends the desktop to make a large, connected desktop 9or clones the desktop, also possible) is only one option here. It is also possible to use xinerama instead of twinview to control the external vga, or to treat the external vga as a seperate screen in X. My main intereste is in being able to give openoffice.org presentations on the external vga, using the new multimonitor support in OOo. So far none of the available solutions has been shown to be ideal.

CategoryLaptop