Dell Latitude D620 - any experiences?

Richard Soule richard.soule at oracle.com
Tue Mar 27 00:02:06 EDT 2007


Scott,

I got a few responses and cut and paste them into this response, see in 
line below (again, these are not from me but from folks at Oracle who 
are using D620s with Linux):

Good luck!

Rich

Scott Garman wrote:
> Richard Soule wrote:
>> Oracle uses the Dell Latitude D620 laptop internally. Quite a few of us
>> run Linux on it. Personally I use Linux within a VMWare VM quite
>> frequently on a D620. (One of the downsides of being in sales support is
>> the pervasive use of MS stuff that ends up not working that great on
>> Linux. On the other hand the pay is pretty good...) We also have folks
>> who use it day to day on the machine itself. We have something called
>> the 'Oracle Base Image' that installs Red Hat Linux with everything you
>> need to get your job done (theoretically) for a D620. It works very well
>> for folks in development.
>>
>> If you have specific questions then I can ask them on an internal list
>> that we have.
> 
> Hi Rich,
> 
> Thanks for the reply. I'm interested in running Linux natively on it,
> and my concerns are primarily with the typical annoyances of running
> Linux on laptops: suspend to RAM, hibernate, and wireless support.
> 
> Even on my current Sony S260, which technically supports and works with
> these functions, I tend to have frequent issues which require me to
> reboot the laptop at least once per week:
> 
> * Wake from suspend freezes the system (no responsiveness from anything
> at all, it's entirely locked up)
> * NetworkManager refuses to associate with my network. It tries but
> never finishes connecting. Repeated connection attempts don't fix the
> problem.
> * (probably related to the previous) - NetworkManager connects to my
> network, and I can use the network for a minute or two, and then I
> totally lose my network connection (NetworkManager still thinks I'm
> connected, though). Other times I start getting massive packet loss.

A good place for linux on laptops is the following link, which you may 
have already looked at.
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/dell.html
You will see commentary for Fedora, Ubuntu, Open SuSE, Debian, and others.

Ubuntu is not the latest version of code, but they have focused on 
laptop work a bit more of late.

In general laptops still suffer from the issues you raise above.  Power 
management (suspend/resume/hibernate) is still an issue, which Intel has 
contributed code to help in current upstream kernels, but the OEMs also 
need to work with the community on their docking station implementations 
to improve this.

Wifi - if your flavor of the Dell laptop has the Intel 3945 - you will 
need to hand tend it from sourceforge.net with all of the appropriate 
firmware, kernel, and daemon support from Intel. The upstream kernel has 
not accepted this solution at this time. The newer versions of Network 
Manager are getting better, but still need some work.
> 
> If I spring for a new laptop, I'm hoping to resolve some of these
> issues. I'm an Ubuntu user, but people running the latest release of
> Fedora would probably be able to tell if recent kernels support these
> options reliably.
> 
> Also, I'd like to hear general impressions of how hot/loud the laptop
> gets. I tried a Core2Duo Macbook recently and found it gets
> uncomfortably hot to use on my lap for long periods of time, and was
> wondering if the D620 is going to exhibit the same problem.

I ran a Thinkpad T60p with a Core2Duo proc, 2 G of RAM, and it was not 
any louder/hotter than my previous T30, T42, T43 running versions of 
Fedora Core 3 and 5.

> 
> Thanks so much for your time,
> 
> Scott
> 

And finally:

Which distribution are you using? You can try Ubuntu Feisty, it works
well.

Reference: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/DellLatitudeD620


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