buying a laptop either bare or with Ubuntu

[Lloyd Kvam]

On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 20:24 -0500, Nikkiana H. wrote:
> I bought both the Studio 15 and the Mini recently and am pretty happy
> with them.

Well the Dell Studio 15 arrived yesterday.  When I tried to boot it, the
splash screens and text boot messages worked fine.  However, when it
came time to draw the desktop, the screen changed to a bright background
with colored pinstripes running vertically.  The bundled diagnostics
(from the boot menu) pass and an external monitor shows a normal Ubuntu
desktop.

I tried the Dell on-line chat support and was given a number for Ubuntu
support.

This turned out to be Canonical.  The person I spoke to said he had
heard that Dell switched LCD screens on the Studio 15 production line
without properly testing the new screens.  Ubuntu is not working with
those new LCD screens.

He gave me the Dell Ubuntu support phone number.  When I called, they
said they have no fix.  I can replace my laptop as defective, but they
do not expect the replacement to work any better.

My guess (as a software guy) as to what is going on:  Ubuntu is only
detecting 4:3 resolutions from the video controller and the LCD screen
only supports 16:9 (or 16:10) resolutions.  I fiddled the xorg.conf with
no success using an external monitor.  I could only get 4:3 resolutions
to show on the external monitor.  Attempts to force 1280x800 which is
the documented resolution for the LCD resulted in a 640x480 screen on
the external monitor.  None of these had any impact on the built-in LCD
screen.

I'm returning the laptop to Dell and will buy something else.


-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp
DLSLUG/GNHLUG library
http://dlslug.org/library.html
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslug
http://www.librarything.com/rsshtml/recent/dlslug
http://www.librarything.com/rss/recent/dlslug