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Dell Inspiron 9400 with Ubuntu Dapper Drake
A few weeks ago I bought a new Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop after my three year old Dell died, 37 days out of warranty. I was running Dapper on that laptop, and I wanted to continue that with this new machine.
The good news: everything works. (Intel) Wireless, Bluetooth, CD/DVD burning, suspend, hibernate, touchpad, brightness dimming, all of the special buttons, USB. I haven’t tried the modem, but I don’t really care about it.
I picked the Intel 945 graphics, so I’m running the experimental xserver-xorg-air-core Xserver. That means that all of the shiny wobbly windows and compositing work well too. However, be sure to switch back to metacity (the default GNOME window manager) before attempting the Quit Gnome screen – the screen becomes active, but it doesn’t work with the compositing so you can never see it. Also, if you use the suspend or hibernate buttons with compiz, usually the system won’t come back – again, switch to metacity using compiz-manager before suspending or hibernating.
Graphics-wise, I was worried that I’d have trouble with the WUXGA screen (1920×1200) on this laptop, but that hasn’t been the case – it worked out of the box with Dapper.
The centrino CPU frequency scaling works well. I went for the Core 2 Duo, so I have independant control of frequencies and frequency governors on the two CPU cores. Thermal monitoring works, so I can get neat graphs.
Altogether, I definitely recommend this configuration to anyone who wants a capable Ubuntu laptop.
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