I had been fruitlessly searching for a notebook PC. Nothing fancy, just wanted some more hardware to play with and also maybe have something to take to school or elsewhere. I didn’t want to get a new one, as I would have wanted something nice and couldn’t justify it because I didn’t really need one that bad.
Ebay has plenty of notebooks, but the ones I might have gone for had little things that I didn’t want to deal with. Like only having USB1.1 instead of 2.0, or not having the right optical drive configuration (wanted to at least be able to burn CDs and read DVDs), or having minor defects; like one RAM slot not working, or a flaky LCD screen.
So after about a year of searching, a dear friend offered theirs that they weren’t using anymore for a completely unfair price (unfair to them). Know this, dear friend: this isn’t over.
The Dell Inspiron 1100 arrived in a beautiful, sturdy laptop case. As Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) had just been released, I attempted to boot up the Live/Install CD, but video did not work correctly. A quick trip to the BIOS indicated that the system was only giving the Intel i845 video chip 1MB of RAM, changed up to 8MB.
It still didn’t boot properly, which is why $DEITY created Google. Including the laptop model in the search, I found that I needed to update the BIOS to a newer version. This was made very painless as someone had provided an ISO to burn, with a boot-able version of FreeDOS to load the BIOS updater. Of course, still scary as anything goes wrong and you have a very cumbersome paperweight.
The machine began to boot up the Kubuntu Live CD, although starting up the desktop environment, KDE, was sluggish. I can see why there were complaints that this machine was very slow, as it only had 256MB of memory. While this would have been fine using a more minimal Linux distribution, Kubuntu is designed to be more user-friendly and has many services that people in general will find useful, but may not be needed in your situation, like a Bluetooth or HP Imaging daemon.
I became impatient watching KDE boot-up and figured the install process would be just as slow. So I quickly downloaded (and those torrents are quick!) the alternate install CD for Kubuntu. Instead of booting into the graphical environment so that you can test out the operating system before (or while) installing, it does a simple text-based installation. Same 6 or so questions you get at the graphical installer, Ubiquity, but no-nonsense. The 20GB drive was wiped and repartitioned. Installation went perfectly smooth.
I don’t normally name PCs. I never have and hadn’t planned to. Nothing against it, just never thought any of my PCs had a personality. Or, a singular personality at least. When I was a Windows user, I usually just named the PC with something like my first initial and last name. With Linux, I’ve been naming it after the current operating system being used. Since both of my machines are using the same operating system and version, that won’t be very helpful. I googled for a random name generator, using one from Behind the Name, which produced ‘Midori’ (“green” in Japanese). One of the first Google entries was a Wikipedia article about the very sexy author, Midori. Nice.
The only minor change I needed to make was to edit my ‘/etc/X11/xorg.conf’ file (display server configuration) to correct the default resolution from 800×600 to 1024×768.
New versions of the *buntu family now have NetworkManager installed by default, making it much easier to roam networks. However, it now uses the ‘wpa_supplicant’ as a backend, which didn’t support my desktop’s Linksys WMP54G. My desktop is only connected to one network and doesn’t roam, so I un-installed it and just set it up at the command line, quick and easy. I was hoping better for the notebook, but I was not surprised that the Dell TrueMobile 1300 card didn’t work out-of-the-box (has a Broadcom chip which notoriously doesn’t work well with Linux). I found some decent how-to’s, but I’m lazy and wanted to support a wireless card that Just Works.
I ordered a 512MB stick o’ RAM (replacing one 128MB stick for a total of 640MB ["ought to be enough for anyone"]), and also a USB wireless card, Edimax Wireless LAN USB Adapter, with a Ralink chip (mostly well supported in Linux). It even lists Linux distributions on the box and includes the drivers on the disc. Nice, but it didn’t work out of the box. I was preparing to compile the driver, but after some thought, I didn’t want wireless functionality coming from a USB port, leaving an empty PCMCIA slot. It was only a $20 card/stick, so it wasn’t a big deal. I checked around retail stores site’s to see which one had a PCMCIA card I could use, drove down to Circuit City, and picked up a $60 D-Link WNA-2330 Rangebooster G. I didn’t bother re-installing NetworkManager, so I’m not sure if it works, but I quickly set the wireless card up at the command line and everything was fine.
Dell Inspiron 1100 running Kubuntu Feisty 7.04 with
custom KDM login screen (click for large version)
I had brought the notebook to work with me one Friday, before I had wireless working, to hook it up to a hard connection and install some software. Usual stuff, codecs, familiar programs. I hadn’t planned to install Beryl, 3D desktop acceleration similar to (although far-surpassing) Vista’s Aero or MacOSX’s, uh, Shiny Pretentious Desktop (not a Mac user, obviously, does it even have a name?), due to the fairly low specs. Celeron processor, 640MB of RAM, integrated Intel video. I figured it wasn’t worth it. Looking for something else, I came across the minimum specs, which I was right around. Figured I’d go for it and it actually works very well, with an unnoticeable hit to either CPU or memory. The framerate isn’t silky smooth, but it does look nice considering the power under the hood. I doubt Vista or MacOSX could boast the same.
The battery doesn’t last very long. I let it charge up until full, then pulled the cord and checked to see what the power management applet said about time remaining, which was about 30-40 minutes. I don’t know if this is due to the battery or possibly poor ACPI support in Linux for this particular hardware, but it’s not a big deal to me. I don’t think I’ve ever used a notebook cordlessly, nor do I have any intention of using this notebook as such. Another reason may be the processor. Intel released the Celeron and Pentium 4 chips without releasing a notebook version right away. People still wanted those processors, so vendors used the power-hungry processors in notebooks.
All said, it’s a beautiful notebook and exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been trying out lighter desktop environments/window managers such as Fluxbox or Enlightenment to squeeze out performance. Also, it’s nice to be able to test out and learn about networking between two Linux machines. Doing things like using the notebook as a remote for the desktop, not taking the whole screen, but just logging in with display forwarding, so applications from the desktop open on the notebook.
Thank you, dear friend.