Dell Continues to Dance with Ubuntu

Dell a few years ago started offering the option of having Ubuntu linux pre installed on some of their machines. A lot of people were excited to ear this but when it happened, noticed that having Ubuntu vs Microsoft on the Dell computer didn’t slice the price of the computers as much as they had hoped.

Well now this has all finally changed with Dell offering there new laptop the Inspiron 15n with Ubuntu Linux. This new laptop is not a netbook and has great specs for an extremely low price of $299!!! The specs of the base $299 laptop are:

• Intel® Celeron® 585 (1MB cache/2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB)
• Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 8.10
• Glossy, widescreen 15.6 inch display (1366×768)
• 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 800MHz
• SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD
• 8X CD / DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive)
• Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini-Card

Now if you ask me that is an amazing steal for a laptop and I see this as yet another stride on brining Ubuntu to the mainstream public.

If you would like to buy or customize the dell inspiron 15n check it out here on the Dell Website.

Upgraded to 9.04 and internet broke!

I just upgraded my dell xps m1530 to 9.04 and all hell broke loose. Wireless internet not working. If you want to follow how peopel help me fix it or you think you have an idea, check out this post to see what were workign on:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7351615&posted=1#post7351615

It Only Took a Month

After recievign my new Dell XPS m1530 laptop with Vista, it only lasted a month with Vista….But getting linux on this machine was no easy task. It took a lot of work and I doubt  anew Linux adopter would be able to succefullly do this. It took my a whoel lot of googleing an dlots and lots of time in the Ubuntu forums and I prettty much have it workign smoothly now!!!

The first road bump in getting Ubuntu running on my Dell xps m1530 laptop had to do with the touchpad. The touchpad on th elaptop was pretty much useless, it woudl just go crazy. After googleing it was eventually easy enough to find a how to for addign soem special command to the kernal line, and now all works great.

The biggest and most trouble some problem was getting my laptops wireless to work in Ubuntu. Ubuntu unfortunetly did not recognize wifi car at all. This was a major bummer because what is  a laptop if you cant get wireless internet?

The wireless card on my Dell xps m1530 is a Dell Wireless 1505 Wireless-N Mini-card

To gte this to work I spent a long long time in the irc and someone super friendly helped me out. Below I will post the logg of our conversation:

Wireless Diver dell Ubuntu How to – Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Wireless Diver dell Ubuntu How to

well let’s see
nope lol lol
or maybe i did register but dont remeber Well, ndiswrapper generallly works better with XP drivers, but I suppose we can try it with Vista ones.
ok What you’re going to want to do is extract the driver to some directory you can get to from Linux.
hmmm ur loosing me already You’re new to this whole seen, aren’t you? :p *scene
i have been usign linux for liek 5 years now but new to this wrapper thing and usually all my hardware has been detected lol but i can get around terminal etc, usually but i have been off of linux for a month and hated vista I understand
sso now i am back Well, do you have Windows at all?
yes i partitioned the hd so i have hardy and vista okay Well, go to Dell’s website, download the driver for your card.
ok I have it here, but I don’t think I can file transfer from this channel.
could you just upload it to www.mediafire.com I’ll link you
thanks appreciate it http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/downloads/en/downloads_ splash?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~mode=popup&file=236824
alrighty that is downloading thanks It needs to be run from Vista, of course, ’cause it’s an exe.
oooo so do i need to log out? and logg into vista? When you extract it, direct it to a folder that you can easily get to in Linux
or can i sue wine? I don’t know, you might be able to use Wine, just for the sake of extraction. It’s worth a shot I guess.
ok so shall i give it a try to use wine go right ahead
if i remember correctly i just cd to the desktop then do a wine filewname.exe ok so it said it sucesfully extracked but then crashe dinstallign but i from what i understand we just needed to extract it? yes
ok so whats next Well, assuming Ubuntu can read your Windows partition, (which it should), now we need ndiswrapper and ndisgtk
ok so sudo apt-get install both? yes, though I can’t remember their exact package names.
i will search synaptic then ok i found them and they are all being installed whats next one minute
ok run ndisgtk
ok in the terminal would be easiest
yes i did then a thing opened i then can pick to install new driver and i have to pick a file, what file do i pick? the inf file I THINK you want is bcmwl6 in the driver subfolder.
ok so i need to find where i extracted it to? yep
do u know where wine puts its c directory in linux? found it no clue, I know that in Windows, the default directory is C:\dell\drivers\R174292 oh okay
so i am looking for a .inf file type? yes
bcmwl6.inf is that the one? I’m PRETTY sure……
ok lets give it ago ok i installed it now what Try the command, ndiswrapper -l
mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ ndiswrapper -l bcmwl6 : driver installed device (14E4:4328) present mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ that’s a very good sign
nice now: sudo depmod -a
ok that didnt give me an output it shouldn’t have
good then lol now: sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
ok that didnt give me an output either but i assuem its not supposed to either nope
cool u have no idea how long i have been tryign to get everythign workign on this lapto pin linux lol actually, with ndisgtk, these last couple commands probably weren’t needed, but they don’t hurt
i feel liek were almost there thast ok, better safe then sorry Now, if you go into System->Administration->Network, you SHOULD have a wireless connection listed.
i dont think soo…. i will send u a screenshot here: http://photie.com/photo/9484/original err…….Okay then
plan b? Let’s go back to the terminal and check something.
ok Show me the output of: ifconfig er, rather, just tell me if you see wlan0 listed
mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1d:09:5f:37:0b inet addr:192.168.1.103 Bcast:192.168.1.127 Mask:255.255.255.128 inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe5f:370b/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:111754 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:75635 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:150187774 (143.2 MB) TX bytes:8255674 (7.8 MB) Interrupt:16 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:4200 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:4200 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:210000 (205.0 KB) TX bytes:210000 (205.0 KB) mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ oo ok lol um… i dont see it do u? nope darn it
so whast that tell us *huff* that google is our last hope? lol
damn i have been googling this for days and havent found or understood much i heard alot abotu this wrapper thigny u have anymore ideas? I just read a forum post saying there’s been [shaky] success with this driver: http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151517.EXE
hmmm so i cant get wireless on my laptop in linux? Well, let’s just try this other driver before we totally give up.
ok which one is that The one I just sent
lol, sorry i am a little out of it downloading now, then i will extract it etc yep
just let me knwo what the file name is i will b elookign for with the wrapper thingy ndis is actually pretty simple after you’ve done it once
yea The file is named bcmw15.inf It’s probably also in a driver subfolder or something.
ok ok its installed hwo do i test if it works again? first, ndiswrapper -l
mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ ndiswrapper -l bcmwl5 : driver installed device (14E4:4328) present bcmwl6 : driver installed device (14E4:4328) present mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ good
ok sudo depmod -a
ok sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
ok ifconfig, is wlan0 there?
yes good, now try sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
ok that gave me nothing look in the upper-right corner of the screen
yes Do you see anything there?
nothign new Well, first of all, is your wireless turned on?
ooo on my network thing it sees networs now networks yep
great!!! thanks sooo much hang on if i am ogign to pick a wireless network cool u still there i think i am wireless now

New Info on Dell mini Inspiron

The Dell ultra portable has finally been revealed at engadget. To me it looks pretty nice and has decent specks. But I think it doesn’t have much when compared to the MSI Wind unless the new Dell is going to be very cheap like $200. If it’s not then I think the Wind is a better choice….

Bought a Dell XPS 1530

I got a sweet deal on a Dell XPS 1530 with 3 gigs of ram and a 160 gig hard drive, along with a 128mb nvidia video card, and finally a 9 cell battery. Can you guess what I paid? $999.99 US. I thought I did pretty good. Anywho It did come with Vista…….So I plan on doing a dual install of Ubuntu on there. Unfortunately I need to keep the Vista for college. But since I will have windows and I haven’t used it in like 5 years, anyone know of any good programs I would like that I can only download and use on windows (I mean without wine…)? I plan on giving Digsby a try, anything else you would recommend?

Size: Eee PC Vs Dell Inspiron

So I recently wrote a post comparing the Dell Inspiron with the Eee Pc 900. i pretty much said the Eee Pc wasn’t worth it when compared to the Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu. A lot of readers then made comments about how the Eee Pc beats the Dell Inspiron when it comes to size and mobility. And I must say the readers are right about the size. Here is a comparison of the two:

As you can see the Dell is much bigger. But I guesse for me needs the Dell is a better deal for me.

Eeepc 900 Worth it?

I have been following the Eee Pc 900 recently, and thought it was a great deal. It’s supposed to come out in the United States this month, and I was thinking of purchasing one. But I have also been looking at the Ubuntu Linux line up too. The problem with the Eee PC 900 is that it is supposed to go on sale for $540 – $560 in the US. I can get a much more legit laptop from Dell for about the same price. Here is a comparison of the two laptops. Here are some Comparison charts I have created of the two laptops:

These are just a few of the comparison that show that for the same price you can get a much better deal with buying the Ubuntu Dell Inspiron 1525. The onlythign that the Eee pc has wich the Dell Inspiron does not have by default is a built in web cam. But you can get a built in webcam on the Dell for an added $25 and its a 2 megapixel webcam makign it better then the Eee Pc default webcam. I think this is easily added when the two prices of the laptops are exactly the same….

But I guesse its up to the buyer to decide for themselves, but for me I would choose the dell with out a doubt!