Salmon and Hardy

Wulp, my new laptop is here and it is quite a sweet piece of equipment. Her name is salmon.jamesonwilliams.com (the color, not the fish.) It shipped with Vista, which I played around with for a few days – and I have to say, it is a fairly nice looking piece of software. But my fun was had, and I was fiending for a CLI – even keeping cmd.exe open at all times – but that doesn’t really get one too far. So, I installed the newly released Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS, which is conveniently for download on the network here at mirror.ox.ac.uk.

Before I talk about Hardy, I should mention some stuff about my new laptop, as my last post on the topic was written before I actually received it.

What’s in the Box?

For detailed information, download this tar ball of various command output about the hardware. I have an lspci, xorg.conf, Xorg.0.log, procinfo, etc., for the Dell Vostro 1310. I hope that these data files are useful to someone. To satiate your appetite, I’ll offer you some of the interesting stuff from the lspci here:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev ff)

Peeves!

There are a few issues. The mono speaker is indeed painfully week, and sounds tinny. It is adequate to fill a dorm room, but it won’t sound good and people will think you’re a punk for not caring about dank tunes. Use headphones.

My configuration came with a TEAC DVD drive that is sort of busted. About 50% of the time when I boot the system, the drive does not initiate (try to grab hold of media inside it.) This stalls the BIOS for about two minutes, and will mean that you can’t use the drive at any higher level (like in an operating system!) I don’t particularly care about this too much since DVD drives are for punks anyway, but the delay in startup is annoying. Psychologically it just sucks to know that its not working right. Perhaps a BIOS update will take care of this issue – I’m not entirely sure that the problem is due to logic in the drive, as of yet. And so we wait for a BIOS release! Proprietary BIOS ftw! But again, this only happens about 50% of boots.

Speedstep and PHC: The Dynamic/Static Duo

Speedstep works fairly well – the cores are usually running at 800MHz. All of the above hardware I listed works in Hardy Heron, with the exception of a bug regarding the Realtek Ethernet card. I haven’t had time to fully investigate it yet, but basically, it “doesn’t work” most of the time. See this thread on ubuntuforums.org, for example. But the 3945abg wireless card works fine, so who cares anyway? This is a laptop computer, not a router.

Despite what is quoted in various other reviews of the laptop, I find that the CPU fan is loud and comes on a fair amount. Although, Speedstep definitely helps with this. When you turn the feature off in the nearly featureless A05 revision BIOS, the fan will blast about half the time, and then shutoff completely the other half of the time, rotating in about two minute long intervals. With speedstep, the fan comes on rarely. Although when it does – oh boy!

I’m going to try to get the Processor Hardware Controller kernel patch working, though, so hopefully I can undervolt the CPU a bit and get it to run cooler. As you’ll recall from Principles of Electrical Engineering – the class that you also took – P=VI. As my previous post showed, the 35W TDP of the Penryn family processor is by far the most expensive power cost within the 1310. Check out this post for specific voltages on a PHC-patched kernel with a Penrym processor.

Hardy Heron

Installing Hardy was a very straightforward process, and it worked almost entirely out of the box on my Dell Vostro 1310. I went with Kubuntu originally, as I had been running KDE on my old laptop for some reason. Well the reason is simple enough, but I can no longer rationalize it – I wanted a taskbar that autohid smoothly. But I think KDE looks notably more ghetto out of the box than does gnome, and unless you spend a long time customizing it, your goose is cooked. x86_64 gnash is working fairly well these days, too, so there’s no need to install 32bit Firefox or any of that nonsense. Unless you want a working java plugin, but We The People don’t like Java anyway. Gnash is a high-priority project for Free Software, too – hell, you’ve got to use it!

I don’t know, I don’t really have a lot to say about Hardy, I guess. It works better than most other distros, including many previous releases of Ubuntu. It doesn’t feel too bloated, either. My root file system is just under 3GB, which isn’t worth writing home about, but hey – not too bad.

Ubuntu is always the distro you keep on your computer so that when you come home late and are tired and want to listen to music and check your mail you can boot up and go without having to worry about the command line if you don’t want to. Debian is where you can have your fun in the daytime.

Love,
Jameson