Fedora 8 on the Dell Inspiron 640m
I’ve been harsh when it comes to Linux on laptops. Simply put, the week before going to foss.in (i.e. last week), I got tired with my tried daily usage of Ubuntu (besides, I went through Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon). So I went with Fedora 8. You’ve got to love rdiff-backup.
What works?
- Wireless, out of the box. This is ipw3945d. Fedora comes with the firmware now, so all is well, it just works out of the box.
- X mirror out, out of the box. Finally, I can present, using my Linux box, without worry that it would suck with an external display. Just hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, ensure the external display is connected, and voila! I get a mirrored display. I’m sure setting it up to be dual-screen is the next uphill task, but lets just keep the good memory of things “just working”.
- Suspend, and resume, out of the box. I can place my laptop to sleep, and wake it up, and all works. Sure, I need to hit Alt+F1, then go to Alt+F7 to see the screensaver login (otherwise, it remains blank), but this tiny workaround is very worthwhile to ensure that my laptop, works like a laptop.
What doesn’t work?
- The WiFi light on my Dell doesn’t turn on. The Bluetooth one is, but the WiFi one remains permanently off. Who cares?
- Occasionally (and I mean, very occasionally), the laptop doesn’t wake up from sleep. I haven’t figured out why yet.
- Pressing Fn+Up or Fn+Down, to get the brightness controls going doesn’t work. While I can control the brightness just fine, its the GNOME applet not displaying it fine. Sound seems to work, so I’m wondering what it might be.
- Occasionally, yum barfs, but I’m on a really slow, and unreliable link. yum clean all, seems to fix things.
I haven’t tried hibernate. I haven’t played with the TV Out. However, my laptop seems to be working more like a laptop, than when I had Ubuntu installed.
Oh, a minor point of annoyance. I can get Compiz working. But playing videos with it enabled, makes the video jerky, slow, and well, sucky. So I clearly can’t use Compiz, yet. But hey, it works (bottom-line and all, right?).
Technorati Tags: fedora, linux, fedora 8, laptop, dell inspiron 640m, inspiron 640m
I’ve been running Ubuntu Edgy Eft on my Dell 600m for some time now, and I’m ready for a change. I’m going to give the Fedora 8 Live CD a try this morning to see how it manages WiFi on this laptop. Functioning sleep/hibernate and consistent video to projector would be nice.
“Just hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, ensure the external display is connected, and voila!”
…or simply use ‘xrandr –auto’ or similar without killing X to achieve the same result :)
“Just hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, ensure the external display is connected, and voila!”
…or simply use 'xrandr –auto' or similar without killing X to achieve the same result :)