Re: [tlug] dell inspiron & linux

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 10:31:28AM +0200, Michael Klaus Engel wrote:

> has someone of you positive or negative experiences with dell notebooks and linux ?

-, -, -!

First of all, you should know that I have a fairly old model, a 3500, so
it may have absolutely nothing in common with the one you are
considering. But given my experiences with this box, I doubt I'll ever
buy a Dell laptop, no matter how cheap it is. The main problems I've had
are:

 * APM acts really weird. Sometimes I try to suspend, and it seems to go
   to sleep and then immediately wakes up again. Other times it will
   just die for no apparent reason while suspended, requiring a reboot.
   Well, APM is buggy anyway, but I never had problems like this with my
   old Toshiba. Maybe ACPI is the real solution, but the Linux ACPI
   drivers are still very incomplete (e.g. didn't have suspend/standby
   capability last I checked).

 * The "sound card" is one of those NeoMagic abominations, and I can
   never get sound completely working. It doesn't help that it is
   seemingly impossible to determine exactly what chipset it has, and
   though there are several Web pages describing how to set up sound on
   this or similar models, they all contradict each other: use ALSA,
   don't use ALSA, hack the sound driver, don't hack the sound driver
   ... you get the idea.

 * Here's the really bad one: sometimes an X session will lock up
   completely, either triggered by a seemingly innocent action like
   clicking-and-dragging a window, or for no apparent reason at all:
   i.e. the screen display is frozen, and no input devices work. I've
   tried SSHing in to the machine and killing the X session, and just
   about everything I could think of that's doable from the command
   line--nothing has any effect. Only rebooting the machine will cure
   it, and since the input devices have stopped working, if it's not on
   a network that means just hitting the off switch. I'm pretty sure
   it's a hardware issue, because the same thing has happened with
   RedHat 7 & Debian Potato & Woody, several different versions of
   XFree86, half a dozen window managers. Though, oddly, Qt-based apps,
   especially Konqueror, seem to aggravate the problem; if I don't use
   them the lockups "only" happen once or twice a month.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee@example.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)