Apr 22

Installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on Dell Inspiron 8600

Category: How-To,Technical Review
Tags: ,,,

**** General Hardware Specifications of Inspiron 8600 ****

Hardware Components Status under Linux Notes
Pentium M processor 1.6Ghz Ok
15.4 WXGA+ (1680×1050) TFT Display Ok Default resolution 1024×768 — Didn’t detect native resolution! I had to manually edit xorg.conf.
See configuration steps below.
ATI Radeon 9600 (Mobile) AGP video card Ok
512MB + 256MB PC2700 Ok
40 GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive 7200 RPM (Toshiba) Ok
Integrated Network Card I don’t know I only used the wireless card for now
Intel Pro Wireless 2915ABG Ok I just had to setup the WiFi SSID and WEP key.
Internal 56k Modem I don’t know… I never tried the modem
DVD-ROW/CD-RW Ok
partially tested		 I’ve been able to read DVD/CDs, but I haven’t tried burning CDs with it.
59 WHr Lithium-Ion Battery Ok
Integrated sound card Ok
IEEE-1394 (Firewire) I don’t know I have no firewire device to try it.
ALPS GlidePoint Ok Mouse navigation, Tap for click, Vertical scrolling are working.
Horizontal scrolling is not working.
PC Speaker Ok
Keyboard – Canadian French Layout Ok
Logitech Wireless Mouse Ok Some special buttons are not working, but that’s not a big deal for me.
4GB Patriot USB Key Ok Just plug it into the USB port and it is automatically detected. An icon is provided on the desktop.

**** Special Keyboard Keys ****

Volume Up / Down Ok
Mute Ok
Media Play/Pause toggle I don’t know
Media Stop I don’t know
Media Skip Next I don’t know
Media Skip Previous I don’t know
Power button I don’t know
Fn + Volume Up / Down Ok
Fn + Mute Ok
Fn + Brigthness Up / Down Ok
Fn + Numeric keypad Ok Behave correctly depending if NumLock is On or Off
Fn + CRT/LCD I don’t know
Fn + Suspend I don’t know
Fn + Scroll Lock I don’t know
Fn + SysRq I don’t know
Fn + Wireless (on/off) Ok But there is no visual indication that wireless on/off has been toggled. ifconfig still show an ip address when wireless is off (maybe by design… I’m too used to ipconfig from Windows ;) ). You need to use iwconfig to see if the radio is on/off.

**** Installation Steps ****

  • Plug the laptop into the power outlet.
    Yes I experienced issues in the past when installing OS (Windows and Linux) while running on battery power. So now I don’t take the chance, its too long to have to reinstall…
  • Boot with CD
  • Choose ‘Start or install Ubuntu’ on boot menu
  • When GNOME appears, start the installation by clicking the ‘Install’ icon
  • Choose the installer’s language: English, [Forward]
  • Choose the time zone: Montreal, [Forward]
  • Choose the keyboard layout: Canada / Canada for standard canadian french layout, [Forward]
  • Partition the hard drive: manual because I have a special dual-boot with Windows XP, [Forward]
  • Migrate Documents and Settings for an existing operating system: none, [Forward]
  • Enter name, login, password and computer name, [Forward]
  • INSTALL! (a 20 minutes step)
  • Restart the computer, don’t forget to remove the CD when asked to
  • Boot Ubuntu 7.04 for the first time :)

**** Configuration Steps ****

Install Ubuntu Updates

  • Open the update manager (System / Administration / Update Manager).
  • Click the “Check” button.
  • Click the “Install Updates” button if any updates are pending installation.
Setup Wireless Connection

  • Open network manager (System / Administration / Network)
  • Open Wireless Connection properties
  • Enter SSID and WEP key
  • Accept the settings and wait for the network manager to complete its initialization
  • I didn’t seem to get an IP address so I unchecked and re-checked the Wireless Connection to finally get it.
  • Close and reopen network manager and you should see the DNS addresses
Set Screen Resolution

  • Curiously, Ubuntu 6.06 and 6.10 was detecting resolution correctly. Now Ubuntu 7.04 didn’t.
    I succeeded to activate the right resolution by editing the xorg.conf manually using the following steps
  • Take a backup of xorg.conf, open a terminal and type:
    sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
  • Edit the xorg.conf, in the terminal type:
    gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  • Change the “Screen” section to allow only the native resolution like this (for each depth — 1, 4, 8, …):
    SubSection "Display"
    Depth 24
    Modes "1680x1050"
    EndSubSection
  • Restart X by pressing CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE and Voilà!
Turn off annoying PC Speaker “beeps”

  • Follow this link: http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/TurnOffBeep

**** Additional Software Installation ****

Automatix2 follow these steps in a terminal window
(taken from http://www.getautomatix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installation): echo "deb http://www.getautomatix.com/apt feisty main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://www.getautomatix.com/keys/automatix2.key
gpg --import automatix2.key
gpg --export --armor E23C5FC3 | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install automatix2
Multimedia codecs
(using Automatix)		 Codecs and Plugins section / Multimedia codecsAfter I installed this, I’ve been able to listen to WMV (Windows Media Movies) files.
KeePassX This is a password manager that is multi-platform.
Works well. Installed using Synaptic from the universe repository.
Firefox Extension:
Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer		 Bookmark synchronizer I setup to connect to my own WebDAV server. It as its problems (not linked to Ubuntu) but works well when synchronizing manually.

**** Additional Notes ****

* I have the feeling the font settings were better with my laptop using the previous versions of Ubuntu. Text looked nicer and was easier to read. Maybe this is a side effect because it didn’t detect my monitor native resolution correctly at first.
* Next steps will be to give a try to the new composite window manager, Compiz…
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