# Adventures in Linux-Laptop-Land

What is it about Dell and their laptops that they have to change the
hardware every few months, even among the same model lines? I used
to have a Dell Inspiron 600m, which worked quite well under Debian
Sarge, with a decent X screen resolution (1400x1050), working sound,
Ethernet and wireless, and working PCMCIA.
  
I recently got a new laptop, and got the next model up in the
Inspiron line (630m), since the 600m was not made anymore. The 630m
has proven to be *very* Linux and Free-Unix unfriendly. The video is
in Intel 915GM card, with the LCD screen only able to do 1280x800
(what a strange resolution, very wide but narrow). Anyway, pretty
much every distro I've tried on it needs the 915resolution hack to
work at anything but 1024x768. Then there is the sound card, an
Intel ICH6 - needing the latest Alsa drivers to get working headset
muting and mic (meaning compile from source). The wireless is a
Broadcom bcm4318 (re-branded as an Intel so you can't tell ahead of
time), which doesn't work unless you use ndiswrapper. And there is
no more PCMCIA - this thing has an ExpressCard slot, which
completely pissed me off since it turned my collection of useful
PCMCIA cards into junk. The SATA hard drive is not supported by the
2.6.8 kernel in Debian Sarge, meaning 2.4 (oddly enough, the SATA
drive *is* supported by the 2.4 kernel installed by default in
Sarge) or something like Ubuntu or Red Hat. ACPI suspend worked
under Breezy, but hibernate has never worked properly on this thing
(perhaps I [didn't try hard enough][1]).
  
I originally had Ubuntu Breezy installed on it, but never could get
the sound card to work properly, a problem since I rely on a SIP
phone for work. I upgraded to Dapper when it was released, still
no-go on the sound card (even after installing the latest CVS Alsa
drivers). Same for Debian Sarge and FreeBSD. I poked around, finding
that others had [some success with sound on this particular laptop
under Fedora Core 5][2], using a particular Alsa version, so I
installed it. Now sound works fully, including mic and headphone
muting, but it is unusably choppy with Ekiga or any other Linux SIP
phone. Grrr...
  
So I just settled on using Fedora Core 5 on my laptop for the past
month or so, sick of all the fiddling, and have been working off my
cell phone when I travel. In my office I just have an old PC running
Debian that runs Ekiga just fine, but this doesn't travel and
defeats the biggest advantage of using an IP phone - being able to
transplant your office anywhere. Fedora has its own warts
(especially for someone so used to Debian for many years), but I'll
save that for another post.
  
So, again, what is it with the current laptop market, Dell in
particular? Full of proprietary hardware that changes every few
months (if I had known I was getting a Broadcom wireless chipset, I
never would have bought it). I keep hoping that the laptop market
will settle on some sort of standard group of hardware components
with open specs, but this will probably never happen.
  
## Comments

**[ARG!](#11 "2006-07-10 09:15:00"):** Did u check abt the hardware
compatibility *before* buying? How can you crib abt things like
PCMCIA cards turning useless? Why go in for such model, if you know
it's not designed for your needs?

**[ARG!](#12 "2006-07-10 09:18:00"):** I bought a laptop couple of
months ago. My only aim was to have a dvd writer in lowest
budget. After doing r-n-d, I bought Acer 2413 NLMi.1.5 GHz celeron40
GB hdd,256 RAM,4 USB,wireless,dvd writer drive,PCMCIA slot.All that
for Rs 33,000/-45 Rs = 1 $.

**[Thinknix](#13 "2006-07-10 13:15:00"):** Yes, I admit to not looking
closely at the hardware specs, however, I was "fooled" into a
false-sense of security as my 600m had worked great under linux. I
figured ther 630m, with similar, but not exact hardware would be OK,
too (inlcuding the Intel wireless). Hence my gripe about Dell making
what I saw (later) as a big change in hardware in the same model
line.

**[Anonymous](#14 "2006-09-07 18:24:00"):** Hi I bought a Lenovo
T60. And it's works fine. I only have Problems with ekiga and using
my mic. But i think that's a alsa Problem. I hear the voice from the
mic in my speakers. But the rest, with the ATI Card, WLAN works. I
never tested the PCMCIA card thing.

[1]: http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/acpi/acpi_howto.txt
[2]: http://people.redhat.com/stransky/alsa/