June 29th, 2006
Kubuntu on a Dell Latitude D820
This page details my installation of Linux on my new Dell Latitude D820 laptop.
Updated July 22, 2006 for volume buttons
Updated August 15, 2006 for Logitech V270 Bluetooth Mouse
Updated October 5, 2006 to disable touchpad
Specs:
Configuration
INSTALLATION:
My partition configuration from the factory was a 20GB Windows partition and the rest of the disk unpartitioned.
I started with Kubuntu 6.06LTS. The installation went smoothly and within 20 minutes I was staring at the default login screen in KDM.
After logging in, I checked various pieces of hardware and noted that the default kernel was not SMP enabled, not did I have working wireless. I plugged in a network cable and restarted eth0 and I was on my network. A fast ‘apt-get update’ and ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ and the installed packages were at the latest patch levels.
Installing synaptic
I prefer synaptic for package management so I issued the command “sudo apt-get install synaptic” and wala, I had my package manager installed.
Then, I started synaptic and did a kernel search and installed the latest kernel (2.6.15-25-686) which includes support for up to 4GB RAM (my laptop has 2GB) and includes SMP support. At this time I also selected the appropriate headers and kernel restricted drivers packages.
Wireless network
After upgrading the kernel, I rebooted and went to mess around with my wireless. No kwifimanager, the kde network manager is awful, so back to synaptic I went and installed “gnome-system-tools” since the network applet included there works like a charm.
Immediately I noticed that my wireless network card was listed (SWEET). I entered my network WEP keys, set the card for DHCP, disabled the wired NIC and enabled the wireless NIC. Off to the races with wireless.
NVIDIA Quadro NVS-110M Turbocache graphic card
The default nv driver that is included with Xorg works just fine, but is rather CPU intensive when you get to mpeg decoding (movies and other video clips), so back to synaptic I went. Installed the “nvidia-glx” package, changed the line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf “Driver “nv”" to “Driver “nvidia”". I then logged out of KDE and hit CRTL+ALT+DEL at the login screen and there is the NVIDIA splash screen. SWEET
Audio Card
What can I say? I have read a lot about problems with alsa and this laptop. It just works for me. I did enable “Full Duplex” in the KDE Control Panel. K Menu >> Sound and Multimedia >> Sound System >> Hardware Tab.
Volume Buttons
The volume buttons are not hardware based, they are software based buttons. Therefore keyboard mapping was required to get them working. I prefer to use xmodmap for this. I created a file called ~/.xmodmap and in it I put the following lines:
keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
then in ~/.bash_profile, I put the following section at the bottom:
# load xmodmap ~/.xmodmap so volume and mute buttons work.
if [ -f $usermodmap ]; then
xmodmap $usermodmap
fi
Added July 22, 2006. If you select the “Dell Inspiron 6xxx/8xxx” keyboard layout, you will yield the same results.
ACPI/Power Management
ACPI just worked also. CPU throttling is working as expected and I am getting about 4 hours typical runtime while on battery. The only caveat is the NVIDIA drivers still do not handle suspend and hibernation well, so this is untested. I have the system set to shutdown at critical battery levels.
Bluetooth
I followed the instructions here: http://math.umh.ac.be/an/D820/ for bluetooth. The instructions are straight forward and they work.
Added August 15, 2006 I purchased a Logitech V270 Bluetooth Mouse. Kubuntu had already installed the bluez package during the installation of the OS because the laptop already had Bluetooth enabled. Therefore, using only part of the instructions at: http://www.bueche.ch/comp/mx900/mx900.html I have a working mouse. I previously used a Memorex USB mouse so Xorg already had the necessary lines in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, so I only had to issue the command: ’sudo hidd –connect ‘ and the mouse immediately started working. At this point, I added this to my login script ‘~/.bash_profile’ and it now works find on startup.
NOTE: If you don’t have a USB mouse available to automatically create the device node, then issue the following commands in the section “/dev/misc/uinput or /dev/input/uinput” on the above linked site.
USB
I tried my old trusty Memorex wireless USB mouse and my external USB 100GB laptop HDD and they both were properly detected and worked with no modifications or additional work on my part. The HDD displayed a mounted disk icon on my desktop and all permissions were properly set. NOTE: The HDD was already formatted to EXT3, so I wasn’t worried about NTFS permissions
Added August 15, 2006, As noted in the previous section, I have purchased a Logitech V270 bluetooth mouse and have stopped using my Memorex USB mouse.
Added October 5, 2006. I dislike using the Synaptics Touchpad. I prefer the pointer stick and my bluetooth mouse, so I disabled the touchpad. To do so, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root and locate the section “InputDevice” for the synaptics touchpad and change the line:
Option “SendCoreEvents” “True”
to:
Option “SendCoreEvents” “False”
Logout, then hit CTL+ALT+BKSP or reboot and the touchpad will be disabled:
Additional Software install VMware is used extensively by me to test new distributions and to run Windows when I feel the need. I downloaded the tarball from them, installed it and there was even an entry in my K menu for it. SWEET
For some reason the installer of Kubuntu does not install kcalc by default. synaptic quickly fixed that for me.
I prefer vlc to watch DVD’s and it also is not on the default install list. But, that was ok, enable multiverse in /etc/apt/sources.list, run a fast ‘apt-get install vlc’ and I was watching movies with my favorite player.
Links
Chris Troestler has a page titled “Debian GNU/Linux on a Dell Latitude D820″ at http://math.umh.ac.be/an/D820/ which I used as the basis for my install.
Kubuntu can be downloaded from http://www.kubuntu.org
If you find any errors in this page, please email me at tony at ournuthut dot net
