The fglrx driver for ATI graphics cards has finally been made available for Intrepid, so I gave it a shot on my Inspiron 1501. On the whole, it's a lot faster and smoother than the open source radeon driver and doesn't leave you with the ugly but momentary artifacts on the screen. Nice.
Unfortunately though it breaks suspend and hibernate, so until ATI can work out the bugs, I'll just have to slog along with the open source driver.
Showing posts with label dell inspiron 1501. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dell inspiron 1501. Show all posts
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Installed Intrepid Ibex Alpha 6 on my Inspiron 1501
Just installed Intrepid on my dell. Started out as just a test install in an extra partition, but I liked it so much, I replaced Hardy with it.
The main points in Intrepid's favour were: suspend and hibernate worked great (please note past tense), the improvements in the Network Manager which mean I can now use it for wifi without crashing things and tabs in Nautilus.
The system is still a little bit of a jumble, as you'd expect from an Alpha, but seems steady enough to use as my main OS.
Suspend and hibernate were working on the initial installation using kernel 2.6.27-3, but is no longer working due to a suspected regression in 2.6.27-4. There also seems to be a driver issue of some sort. See my bug report on launchpad.
Network manager is advancing at a great rate. Mark Shuttleworth's ambition or having constant internet wherever and whenever is looking like becoming a reality. This is also the first time that I have been able to use Network Manager to connect to wifi without crashing things. No more wifi-radar! One issue with the wifi on the 1501 was that the drivers would not install through apt or the Hardware Drivers manager. I installed the windows driver using ndiswrapper and the guide here.
Finally to tabs in Nautilus. Gotta love it. I had a long convo with the Nautilus developers in Aug 2007 about tab support and was told pretty much that it would happen when hell freezes over, that I could write my own code if I wanted, but I wouldn't get any help and it wouldn't be implemented anyway. Great. I used pcmanfm instead. Well, I don't see any ice creeping up from the deeps and I'm using tabs in Nautilus. Seriously though, a big well-done to the Nautilus developers. They put in a lot of work and it's a great feature.
That's all for now. Back to the essay I'm supposed to be doing...
The main points in Intrepid's favour were: suspend and hibernate worked great (please note past tense), the improvements in the Network Manager which mean I can now use it for wifi without crashing things and tabs in Nautilus.
The system is still a little bit of a jumble, as you'd expect from an Alpha, but seems steady enough to use as my main OS.
Suspend and hibernate were working on the initial installation using kernel 2.6.27-3, but is no longer working due to a suspected regression in 2.6.27-4. There also seems to be a driver issue of some sort. See my bug report on launchpad.
Network manager is advancing at a great rate. Mark Shuttleworth's ambition or having constant internet wherever and whenever is looking like becoming a reality. This is also the first time that I have been able to use Network Manager to connect to wifi without crashing things. No more wifi-radar! One issue with the wifi on the 1501 was that the drivers would not install through apt or the Hardware Drivers manager. I installed the windows driver using ndiswrapper and the guide here.
Finally to tabs in Nautilus. Gotta love it. I had a long convo with the Nautilus developers in Aug 2007 about tab support and was told pretty much that it would happen when hell freezes over, that I could write my own code if I wanted, but I wouldn't get any help and it wouldn't be implemented anyway. Great. I used pcmanfm instead. Well, I don't see any ice creeping up from the deeps and I'm using tabs in Nautilus. Seriously though, a big well-done to the Nautilus developers. They put in a lot of work and it's a great feature.
That's all for now. Back to the essay I'm supposed to be doing...
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