My laptop has a Intel Wireless WiFi 5100 half height card. I had a problem with it losing connection with a wireless access point using 802.11n. This problem is a known issue with the iwlagn driver, and the best workaround is to disable 802.11n on the card. To disable 802.11n on this card create/edit your /etc/modprobe.d/options.conf file
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options.conf
And add the following to it.
options iwlagn 11n_disable=1 11n_disable50=1

I was also have trouble in the timing between the nvidia driver and GDM loading at boot on my laptop. LP #532436. I have to have cron relaunch GDM at boot for a rough workaround for this problem.

1. sudo vim /etc/crontab and add this line to the end:
@reboot root /root/gdmstart

2. Create the shell script to relaunch GDM
sudo vim /root/gdmstart

with this contents:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 6
/usr/sbin/service gdm start

3. Make script executable.
sudo chmod u+x /root/gdmstart

One other problem I had with this laptop with any version of Linux is not being able to burn CD/DVDs with Linux. The fix was to downgrade the firmware for the HLDS HLDS GS20N 9.5mm Slotload SATA DVD-RW drive to version A108.

What workarounds did you have to tweek to get Ubuntu working on your hardware? Post them here, and be sure to file a bug on your problem if you have not already.

Specs.

• Intel® Core™2 Duo processor E7500
• 8GB DDR3 SDRAM
• DVD±RW/CD-RW drive
• 1TB Serial ATA hard drive (7200 rpm)
• Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD
• 7.1-channel audio support.
• Built-in 19-in-1 digital media reader
• Dell 1525N Wireless-N mini card (802.11b/g/n)
• Built-in 10/100/1000 Ethernet LAN

Everything on this computer works out of the box with Ubuntu. I thought the Dell 1525N wireless card was a Broadcom device and was planning a night of sacrificing chickens to the dark wireless gods to get it working under Linux. I was pleased that the card used the ath9k driver and works great in Ubuntu.

With 8GB of ram, I installed the amd64 version of Ubuntu Lucid RC, and I’m amazed how far the 64bit version has come since the last time I tried it. If you have delay switching over to 64 bit for PC with more than 3GB of memory, now is the time to switch. I found the user experience between using the 32bit vs 64bit nearly identical.

The only issue I had with this machine was that the installer ran very very slow, about 10 minutes for the first screen to appear. I’m looking to see if there is an existing bug that matches this problem, if not I will be running ubuntu-bug ubiquity tonight.

If you are looking for a desktop that works great with Ubuntu, I strongly recommend the Dell Inspiron 560.

Dell Studio XPS 1340

I recently got a new Dell Studio XPS 1340 laptop to replace my older XPS m1330 that was having video problems. The Dell Studio XPS 1340 is sold in Dell Ubuntu store but since Dell will not sell PCs with Ubuntu to Higher education institutions I ended up getting the Vista based model.

Comment: Come on Dell, selling Ubuntu based machines to Higher Education institutions is a no-brainer. The college crowd is going to be one of your biggest markets for Linux based computers.

Ubuntu works pretty much out of the box, even on the Vista version of the laptop. Only a few tweaks were needed.

1. DVD/+-RW Drive: Dell recently released a new version of the firmware (A110) to add Windows 7 compatibly to the drive. This version of the firmware causes errors when trying to burn CD/DVDs. Downgrading to version A108 of the firmware fixes this problem.
2. Wireless: The Dell Wireless 1510 802.11n Half-Mini Card does work with Ubuntu after installing the Broadcom STA driver via System –> Administration –> Hardware Drivers. The card does generate errors and disconnects in Ubuntu 9.04 if you are connected to a wireless access point using WPA with TKIP encryption. The best solution I have to switch your wireless router to use WPA2 with AES encryption if possible. This problems seems to be solved in Ubuntu Karmic. The card/driver also has the problem of always shows 100% wireless strength when connected, I found no solution for this. If you can get the Dell 1397 802.11b/g card I would suggest it instead.
3. External Microphone: Works fine with tweaking in Ubuntu 9.04 but not at all in Ubuntu Karmic.
4. Suspend/Hibernate: Both seems to work fine even though they generate some errors in the kernel log.