Thinking of Dell Studio 15

I'm thinking of purchasing a Dell Studio 15. I want the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 graphic card (I am avoiding nVidia 8000 and 9000 series due to their quality control heat problems, and avoiding the Intel 4500 GMA due to its questionable Linux support).

Does anyone have any linux tidbits? I've read applying "model=m6" to one's /etc/modprobe.d/sound file (or alsa-base or what ever file one's distribution uses) works for the sound. I think the audio codec is a STAC92HD73X (ie IDT92HD73C1X5) using the snd-hda-intel kernel module. I'm assuming that when one plugs in an external headset, the sound to the speakers is properly muted (that is a problem with the alsa driver for some new audio codecs).

I've read with the 2.6.27 kernel, the Intel WiFi Link 5300 works well.

Has anyone had success with the bluetooth ? The webcam ? The V.92 modem ? the finger print reader ? (I confess none of those are important to me). How about the eSATA or the HDMI (those area all pretty new to me).

Any experience to pass on? I may "pull the trigger" on this purchase tomorrow.

 

Correction, this is the Radeon HD 3450 graphic card.

I note Dell sell the Studio-15 with Ubuntu already installed ....
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs but in the most part, with different hardware options than what I intend to select.

 

All I wanna say is remember: don't buy any of Dell's WLAN cards, like I did to my everlasting regret. The drivers are all from Broadcom and so far I haven't come across any version of Linux that actually works with the ****ed thing, and ndiswrapper isn't working with my INF file, for some reason. Highly irritating, believe me. However if you're a Linux pro, go ahead and get what you like I suppose. Good luck!

 

I tested Ubuntu 8.10 on my Studio 15, and almost everything essential worked, although I did not do extensive testing, such as trying the HDMI or eSATA ports. However, the wireless card, GPU, Bluetooth, and webcam all worked without any problems; it's an impressive improvement in compatibility, considering that neither the wireless or graphics card were detected in 8.04.

 

Is 8.10 capable of dealing with some of the wireless cards that have caused so much grief til now?
Non-Intel wireless card troubles are the stuff of legend. I bought a Centrino lappy specifically because I didn't want to screw around with ndiswrapper/madwifi/whatever.
It'd be a great stride forward if Ubuntu has conquered that problem, or at least part of it. If only part of it, we need to know which ones work and which ones don't.

Apparently Intel is re-working Linux support for the 4500 video chipset. Could be rough for a few months. Phoronix had a good article discussing this a few days ago.

 

Well, my Dell wireless card (rebranded Broadcom) card worked without any problems out-of-the-box with 8.10; it seems that they added some new wireless drivers.

 

Yep they did!
Broadcom's official drivers are now included if I remember correctly, and the other Broadcom drivers have improved loads as well.

 

My Atheros wireless card has been working OOTB for the first time.
Bye bye Madwifi..

 

So I went ahead and purchased the Dell Studio 15 laptop. After my wife played with Vista a bit (with vista crashing/freezing once), I had the chance to insert a live CD (openSUSE-11.1 beta5) and boot, to test some Linux compatibility.

Initially no audio with the speaker test I normally apply:

speaker-test -Dplug:front -c2 -l5 -twav​

The speaker test kept freezing despite my trying various mixer settings. No sound.

I then ran alsaconf. Tested the audio (with the above speaker test). Again, the test kept freezing despite my trying various mixer settings. No sound.

I then applied the line "options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6" to the end of the /etc/modprobe.d/sound file. No sound, and again the test kept freezing.

I then went into YaST (the openSUSE configuration tool) via YaST > Hardware > Sound and selected the advanced option to test the sound. I applied through YaST the "dell-m6" in the gui area to specify the model. I tested the sound under yast. There was sound !!

I then closed yast and tried the above sound test, ... no sound as a regular user nor as root. Bizzare !! Then it occured to me, ... maybe the Dell doesn't like my sound test. Duuuuhhhhhh

So I tried this as a sound test:

speaker-test -c2 -l5 -twav​

sound worked as a regular user with the modifed test !!!

So now I am thinking of users who reported this problem (of the sound test freezing), who had asked me for help, and I could not help them, until I encountered this myself. Sigh. Do we just get slower and dumber with age? :shame:

So I plugged in a headset in one of the two headset output jacks. Speaker sound was muted (good) BUT there was no headset sound! (bad).

So I plugged the headset in the second headset output jack. Speaker sound was not muted (bad) but headset sound worked ! (good). But headset volume was not independant and was tied into the speaker volume (bad).

Which means both headsets are unusable.

So I looked at the /cat/etc/modprobe.d/sound file and noted the line I prevous put as an option "options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6" was put as the first line in the file by YaST. So I changed it to the last line, restarted alsa, and it made no difference.

Hmmm... this could be a KDE4 glitch, but I don't think so. I think this is an alsa glitch. I may have to write a bug report on this. I noted my tsalsa was this:
tsalsa.txt - nopaste.com (beta)

and my installed apps in openSUSE-11.1 beta5:

Code:

linux@linux:~> rpm -qa | grep alsa
alsa-oss-1.0.17-1.29
alsa-plugins-pulse-1.0.18-5.4
alsa-utils-1.0.18-5.4
alsa-1.0.18-6.3
alsa-plugins-1.0.18-5.4
alsa-firmware-1.0.17-1.36
linux@linux:~> rpm -q libasound2
libasound2-1.0.18-6.3 

Code:

linux@linux:~> rpm -qa | grep pulse
pulseaudio-module-zeroconf-0.9.12-6.6
libpulse-browse0-0.9.12-6.6
libpulse-mainloop-glib0-0.9.12-6.6
alsa-plugins-pulse-1.0.18-5.4
pulseaudio-utils-0.9.12-6.6
pulseaudio-module-x11-0.9.12-6.6
pulseaudio-module-jack-0.9.12-6.6
libxine1-pulse-1.1.15-18.6
libpulse0-0.9.12-6.6
libpulsecore4-0.9.12-6.6
pulseaudio-0.9.12-6.6
pulseaudio-module-lirc-0.9.12-6.6
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth-0.9.12-6.6
pulseaudio-esound-compat-0.9.12-6.6 

Code:

linux@linux:~> uname -a
Linux linux 2.6.27.5-2-default #1 SMP 2008-11-11 15:15:33 +0100 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux  

Code:

linux@linux:~> cat /etc/modprobe.d/sound
options snd slots=snd-hda-intel
# u1Nb.ifylLOqC327:82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6 

Anyway, this was a live CD test with beta software. Its possible alsa is buggy on this, and unless I have someone point to something obvious I did wrong, I am going to write a bug report.

Getting the headset behaviour to function is very important to my wife and I as we like to watch movies on the laptop, while waiting at the airport, or when on the train (during long train trips).

 

As noted in my previous post, I purchased a Dell Studio 15 and it arrived earlier today. I booted to an openSUSE-11.1 beta5 live CD to check out the laptop running under Linux (prior to installing).

Here is something I am puzzling over wrt the partitioning.
I typed "su" to get root permissions, followed by typing fdisk -l and this is what I got:

Code:

linux:/home/linux # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          18      144553+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2              19        1324    10485760    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3   *        1324       30402   233566208    7  HPFS/NTFS 

I understand /dev/sda3 is the Vista partition. And /dev/sda2 is the Dell/Vista recover partition for Vista. But this /dev/sda1 has me puzzled. What on earth is that? Some Dell utility that takes only 144 MB of space, in its own partition !!

Has anyone else seen anything like that? What is that /dev/sda1 ? I'm thinking a service call into Dell is needed to get an explanation.

Since my wife wants Visa left on the laptop, I assume that I simply carve up space off of the Vista partition /dev/sda3 and leave /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 untouched.

Any views?

 

oldcpu -
Tell you what I've been doing with my Ubuntu laptop. When I want to listen to headphones, I go into Volume Control and click on the little speaker below the "Surround" sliders. With the red X over the speaker icon the headphones still work but the main speakers are turned off. The Ubuntu Volume Control is just a frontend for alsacontrol I think.
Have you tried that in alsacontrol?

 

I've been told that the first Dell utility partition has something to do with when Dell techies want to look inside your PC via a network connection. Some sort of diagnostic function. Or something like that. I can't suggest whether you oughta get rid of it or not.

There have been lots of posts regarding Dell partitioning. I can't remember what people ended up doing.
Seems like the last guy on this forum burned his recovery DVD's, then deleted the recovery partition, then used the Vista partitioner to move Vista to the "left" into the unallocated space. Vista then had to run a repair sequence before it would boot, but it did boot.
Use Vista to move or downsize the Vista partition, not GParted or Partition Magic or whatever.

As many people who have slammed into this wall, you'd think we'd have some specific directions for partitioning by now for Dell, Acer, etc. but it seems like it's every man for himself.

 

Moving partitions to the left often results in irreversibly damaged filesystems, from my experience. It has never worked.

 

I have not tried that. I booted to an openSUSE-11.1 beta5 KDE-4.1.2 live CD. I'll give that a try tonight with that live CD, and if it does not work there, I'll give it a try with an openSUSE-11.1 beta5 Gnome LiveCD.

My plan is to install openSUSE 11.1 beta5 from the installation DVD later this week.

If keeping it is an option, then I will keep it. My wife wants to use the Vista partition.

I'll definitely want to keep the Vista partitions (all 3) to keep my wife happy, as we will share the laptop. Like our older laptop, it will get used most on our vacations and my business trips.

Thats interesting advice. I normally use GParted or Partition Magic to carve up a hard drive first, or sometimes I simply let the openSUSE installer carve up the hard drive (it uses the gparted tool). Is there a specific reason why its necessary for the Vista partition tool to do this?

With my having less than 30 minutes experience with Vista (of which 10 were rebooting after a Vista crash (total freeze of PC) less than 1 hour after switching on the laptop for the first time) I would not have a clue where to look for this in Vista. In comparison I've been using Linux for 10 years (of which 7 are with SuSE) so its much quicker for me to do this in Linux if it can be done safely with Linux. I basically missed the Win98, Win98se, Win98me, WinXP experience at home, so I am a "fish out of water" when it comes to navigating in Windows.

Indeed ! Maybe I need to surf on this and see what I can discover.

 

I think Bog's advice is very good. Moving the Vista partition to the "left" would indeed be taking a chance. Sounds like Bog's success rate has been zero. I thought I'd followed a thread or two where it did finally work after Vista repaired itself, but that's skating a bit far out onto the thin ice.

Several folks have mentioned that moving the Vista partition is safest with the Vista partitioner. I tried moving mine with a GParted LiveCD and it became unbootable. If I'd known what to do probly could have repaired it, but I tossed in my freshly minted recovery DVD's and ran them. This was on an Acer. The Acer recovery DVD's got rid of the extraneous partitions (there were originally 4 primaries!) and left me with one Vista partition.
By screwing up, then using the recovery DVD's, I inadvertently cleared the way for Ubuntu

OK, one thing about those volume sliders - I don't know if you'll see all of them from the LiveCD? I installed Ubuntu, then went in to Volume Control and turned on all the sliders. There were only five or six showing at first. I don't know if "Surround" was one of them from the get-go or not.

With the three Dell partitions intact, you might not be able to do anything from a GParted LiveCD. You should be able to create one more primary, or at least an extended partition, but in my experience GParted would not let me. When it saw three primaries it would pop up an error window saying "You can't make more primary partitions" or something similar. I wasn't TRYING to make another primary, but I couldn't tell GParted that. This was with an older version of GParted, maybe newer ones will be more cooperative? Or just let SUse try to install - it's probably smart enough to make an extended and put Suse inside (?)

 

Is it necessary to move Vista at all as part of a Linux dual boot install?

OK, ... I guess we will see.

I am more worried about downsizing Vista with a non-Vista tool (such as gparted or parted magic) and then breaking some vista hard drive quality check ...

Is there such a Vista partition size check that I need be concerned about? WinXP has none, but I have no idea about Vista.

 

I ended up using the vista partitioner to carve up a partition for Linux. Given my less than 30 minute of Vista expertise, I managed to get a Vista knowledgeable user on the #suse chat channel to walk me thru disabling the vista page file and disabling the system restore, so I could get a decent defrag. But of the 228 GBytes that Vista had free, it stubbornly hung on to 128 GBytes and only released 100 GBytes. Its insistance to keep the large 128 GBytes puzzled me, but what can one do? The larger Vista partition will keep my wife happy.

Anyway, I installed openSUSE-11.1 beta5 on the 100GByte freed partition and the grub boot manager was installed on the MBR. The laptop booted ok to both vista and openSUSE afterward.

I'm still working on trying to support the solving of the Dell Studio 15 headphone sound problem: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=446025

Reference the surround sound suggestion, thanks for the recommendation, but unfortunately in kmix on kde-3.5.10, it has no effect to mute or not mute.

 

I'm very happy to hear that the partition/installation came out successfully. 100Gb should be plenty, eh? I've added dozens of apps to my Ubuntu / partition and it's still less than 4 Gb. The amount of data that accumulates in /home is of course contingent on each user...
I am curious about the final partition map. Could you post a screenshot, or explain it via text? What I'm most curious about is how openSUSE solved the situation with primary partitions. The original Dell partitioning had you pretty much painted into a corner with 3 primary partitions.

My Acer was even worse, with 4 primary partitions!!

So I'd like to know how the SUSE installer solved that - did it create one extended partition and put all Linux partitions inside? Did it create a primary / partition with an extended swap?

As of late have been researching how to replace our P4 desktop with something less power-hungry. Would like to build my own but might buy an assembled PC. The Studio 15 pops up here and there as an efficient or "green" PC. What do you think of it so far? Aside from the headphone issue that is...

 

ok, below is the output of "fdisk -l"

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          18      144553+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2              19        1324    10485760    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3   *        1324       17395   129089532    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4           17396       30401   104470695    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           17396       17657     2104483+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6           17658       20268    20972826   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           20269       30401    81393291   83  Linux 

The "saving" aspect of the install was that Vista was on sda3. Which meant when I shrank vista, I was able to make sda4 into the extended.

openSUSE installer initially proposed some bizarre partitioning setup, downsizing Vista even more. While I liked that idea, I was not confident it would work. So I went into the openSUSE installation partitioner advanced settings, and told it to forget its proposal, and rescan the disk. After it did that, I had it propose a setup again, and this time it proposed what I wanted (for sda4 to sda7, as you see above). sda6 is / and sda7 is /home.

I have also subsequently been told there is a Vista diskpart program that can be run from the Vista command line, which one can use to reduce Vista in size even more. So since I plan to replace openSUSE-11.1 beta5 with the final released version of openSUSE-11.1, despite my pathetic Windoze knowledge, I just may restore the Vista MBR (replacing grub) and then wipe off openSUSE-11.1 beta5. Then I'll shrink Vista even more, and once again install openSUSE-11.1, but this time hopefully I'll get more than just 100 GBytes. I'm curious if I can get Vista down to 70GBytes or so.

Because I am running Beta software (openSUSE-11.1 beta5) I don't expect too much yet. Wireless (Intel WiFi Link 5300 AGN) "just worked" ) - ie less than 15 minutes to setup. That is because openSUSE-11.1 beta5 comes with the 2.6.27 kernel.

I have not setup the web cam yet. And I'm still using the openGL radeonhd driver at 1024x768. Once openSUSE-11.1 is released in mid-Dec, I'll install a proprietary ATI driver to get the higher resolution.

I'm reasonably happy with the laptop. Its a bit bigger than my previous laptop, and about the same weight (maybe a bit heavier) but I went for the 9 cell battery which is bigger and heavier than the 6-cell.

The biggest thing I want to get fixed now is the sound (ie get the headphone to function properly) which is why I've written a bug report and I'm actively supporting investigations by a SuSE/alsa dev into this headphone problem.

My previous PCs were very old (athlon 1100 with 1GBytes ram) so the Studio 15's P8400 with 4GB RAM "flies" in comparison. Unlike some on the web, I have no complaints with the construction, nor the keyboard, nor the "tinny" sound aspect of the speakers. My previous laptop was worse. I also have not heard the "crackling" that some users have complained about re: the sound playback.

 

Oh, it's a laptop. I shoulda checked. I knew Dell is using the "Studio" moniker for a whole new line of PC's but thought the 15 is that small, oval-shaped desktop unit.

A laptop is more energy efficient than just about any desktop anyway...

I've never run any version of SUSE. Your description of the partitioning process, where it proposes a plan and you can either accept or go into more detail, sounds very appealing.

I like that it set up a /home partition for you!

The SUSE installer solution - making an extended "box" for all the Linux partitions - is absolutely the correct one IMO.

 

I have tried this with kmix and it does not work.

I suspect this is highly laptop (and hardware audio codec) specific. I believe you have a different laptop make.

I am able to get partially functioning headset sound after installing a patch (alsa-driver-snapshot) from one of the alsa devs, but the functionality is still not correct (although at least I have a work around that I can use in public cyber connections and when using the laptop to play videos/music in public places like trains, airports, ... etc ... ).

But this snapshot may be kernel version specific, and I don't know if it will work when I switch from openSUSE-11.1 beta5 to the openSUSE-11.1 Gold Master'd version (ie the official release). I will try installing that patch again at that time, if the "dev" has no other proposed solution.

 

Yes, correct, we have an Acer. One of the suggested audio fixes when I first started poking around was including some line about "acer" in the modprobe list. That didn't work.

My impression is that the manufacturers include all sorts of weird little bits of code in their laptops that are largely absent in the desktops.

Glad to hear you have a partial fix anyway...

 

Thanks! I now have more than just a partial fix. I've been working here to get this fixed in this openSUSE bug report: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=446025

The alsa dev (Takashi Iwai, who I believe is a Novell employee paid to support alsa) came up with a fix that a couple of us tested on openSUSE. Sound (both side headphones, and speaker) now work properly in terms of the mute functionality with an alsa-driver-snapshot that he created (required custom ./configure, make make install-modules) compiling to test for him. This will now likely make it upstream to an update to alsa so all distributions can benefit.

I understand some Ubuntu users have had this functional for a while, but unfortunately that was a "unique to Ubuntu" solution that did not help the other Linux distributions.

I also tested the external Mic on the Dell Studio 15 (with the Takashi Iwai fix) and it also works.

I hope to setup my webcam soon, and once that is set up I'll test the internal integrated mics (that are located on either side of the webcam).

 

Things are going well on the Dell Studio 15 laptop that I purchased.

I finally managed to get my Vista partition reduced from originally taking up about 230 GBytes down to about 70 GBytes.

I initially reduced Vista's hard drive space from 230 GB to about 125 GB using the Vista Gui partitioning tool. But Vista would not let me partition it any smaller. I turned the unassigned space that was released into an extended partition, and installed openSUSE-11.1 beta5 on that partition.

With the announcement of openSUSE-11.1 RC1, I decided as part of my installing the new openSUSE-11.1 RC1, to reduce Vista even further. So after ensuring I had recovery CD (for Vista) ready, and after defragging Vista again, I used the gparted live CD to reduce Vista from 125GB to about 70 GB.

I rebooted to Vista after this size reduction, and got a bunch of errors. But after 30 minute of driver churning and various reboots (and access to the Vista recovery partition) Vista repaired itself and was happy to boot again from grub.

I then merged the extended partitions (with openSUSE-11.1 beta5), reformatting those partitions, and meging them with the free'd up space from Vista being downsized, to one large extendeded partition, and I installed openSUSE-11.1 RC1 on that. I had a few hiccups with the MBR not being setup correctly with grub, but after some hours of head scratching, and trying different solutions, I eventually I succeeded, and I can now dual boot with 70GB to Vista, 155 GBytes to openSUSE Linux, and 10 GBytes to a recovery partition.

I now have the laptop working nicely on openSUSE-11.1 RC1 on KDE-3.5.10, with:

• radeon 3450 working at 1440x900 with radeonhd openGL driver;
• Intel WiFi Link 5300 AGN wireless running nicely;
• Integated (Ricoh) Webcam working ok with uvc driver;
• Integrated SD card reader working ok;
• Sound (speaker, 2xheadset outputs, and external mic) also working with openSUSE-11.1 RC1 (and with some alsa rpms packaged by one of the alsa devs with the necessary fix);
• most of the "hot" Fn keys working: screen brightness (up/down), CD eject (both of them), hibernation, volume up, volume down, mute, media player start (starts amarok), media player stop,start/pause (works with smplayer).

Fn Keys I don't have working yet are battery status key, and media "go-to-end"/"go-to-start", and I have not tested "monitor out" function key.

I still need to test the firewire output, esata output, and play more with the power management.

The integrated microphones (two of them) don't appear to work, and I have not tested the HDMI and I don't expect it will work either.

 

OK, oldcpu, I'm waiting on the step-by-step guide for how you got Vista to work after using GParted

 

I do not know Vista (nor indeed any Microsoft product) well enough to even dream of providing a step by step guide.

What I can say is I ensured that I kept the original Dell 10-GByte partition, in addition to downsizing the Vista partition with Gparted. When I booted to Vista, it immediately noted there was a problem, and launched some sort of automated recovery process that "fixed" what ever problem it had. Whether that recovery process accessed the 10GByte Dell partition as part of its fix, I can not say.

I can say that dual boot (between Vista and openSUSE) works fine now.

I did not have to resort to the Vista recovery DVD, although I did have it handy just in case.

 

I tested the HDMI under openSUSE-11.1. The video works fine, but the HDMI audio does not work.