Dell Latitude D830 and Ubuntu Feisty (64 bit)

DelGurth | Friday, October 26, 2007

I recently got a Dell Latitude D830 to work on, since I’ll be travelling quite a lot and for that it’s useful to have your development environment with you on the road. The disadvantage is that you can have your development environment with you all the time.

To get Ubuntu, the development environment we use at magproductions, working on it I had to use the Alternative install, since the Feisty live CD didn’t work. The new Gutsy live CD does work though. Only with that one there is a sound issue, see this ubuntu wiki page for a way to solve that. And well, I’ll wait till Gusty is used in the wild a bit longer before I’m going to upgrade.

Anyway, finally I’ve got it working with my docking station. There was an annoying bug in the intel linux driver which made it impossible for me to work with Ubuntu using the docking station. But a while ago that was fixed in the Gutsy version of the xserver-xorg-video-intel package.
I had to use Prevu to get the display working properly. Good thing the ubuntu forums have a lot of information. I just wish information would be placed together, that’s why I’m making this post now.

For Prevu I first had to understand how that worked. If you get an python exception while tying to build a package you need to look for dependencies. And then you need to build the dependency using Prevu first, before you continue. After building the dependency I had to run prevu-update, so Prevu knew that the dependency was available.

In the end I’ve the following Prevu packages installed:
libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx libglu1-mesa mesa-utils prevu x11-common xbase-clients xorg xprint xprint-common xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-video-intel xutils

I also tweaked the touchpad a bit, for example I don’t like it to respond on my thumb when I’m typing. And the default speed is just horrible. For that I used the defaults from another ubuntu forums post. I ended up with

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver          "synaptics"
Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
Option          "HorizScrollDelta"      "0"
Option          "SHMConfig"             "1"
Option          "FingerLow"             "30"
Option          "FingerHigh"            "40"
Option          "MaxTapMove"            "100"
Option          "TapButton1"            "1"
Option          "TapButton2"            "3"
Option          "TapButton3"            "2"
Option          "MinSpeed"              "0.15"
Option          "MaxSpeed"              "0.90"
Option          "AccelFactor"           "0.10"
Option          "VertScrollDelta"       "25"
Option          "HorizScrollDelta"      "30"
EndSection

Another problem was that the CDRom drive was not detected. I used yet another site to fix that. Update, that site doesn’t really show that information (anymore?), but this site describes the fix.

Now a list of helpful sites: