Ubuntu on a Latitude E6520

Hello,

I will receive my E6520 next week. I ordered it without any OS and will install Ubuntu on it.

I heard that there is some consumption issues on this model when it runs with Ubuntu. Is there someone who install this OS on this model ? Is the issue fixable ? And if there is consumption issues, does that mean overheat issues and fans running faster ? I mainly bought this model because it seems to be very quiet, it would be bad to lose this silence because of the OS.

Thanks for your help.

Edit : If there are other known issues regarding this configuration, I would be glad to be aware of them (and their respective solutions if exist of course )

 

Nobody ?

 

Where have you heard about the issues? If you have a source, you could possibly find out about fixes.

 

I ordered it here : http://www.portable-etudiant.com/

This offer is reserved for french students.

 

Depending on the laws in your country Dell will (reluctantly) offer a "no OS" option if you insist on that. This "no OS" option actually means that you'll get a FreeDOS CD instead of anything from Redmond.

 

Hi Fredro,

I have ubuntu on mine, and it does use more power than in windows 7 (maybe ~30%), but I have not had time to try and track down any solutions to this.
Also the driver for the trackpad is very poor - it works but there are no configuration options, so the cursor speed is stuck at a slow setting. It appears that others have had this issue with other laptops containing the same ALPS trackpad. There might be a solution - someone posted some patches to the trackpad driver but they were only for some dell laptops and got rejected for being model specific. Again, I have not had time to investigate, but those patches might be a solution.

Edit: My laptop is a E6320, not the E6520, but the hardware should be very similar, so the same issues probably apply

 

The best resource for Linux power use issues is the Phoronix site. This is one article that addresses one cause and suggests adding pcie_aspm=force to your GRUB boot kernel line. I am using that for Fedora on Latitude and Precision laptops without any issue.

But you can still expect higher power drain than Windows until the issues are fully resolved in the kernel and video drivers, etc.