Compatibility of Vostro 1320 and Ubuntu

It works fine for me. P8700/4GB/320GB/Dell 802.11b/g

I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 x64 and it "just worked".

Hi,

    Well its running superb on my Dell Vostro 1320. All the features including all graphics and sound are great.

The only problem i am facing is the drivers for the webcam installed on my machine.Its an integrated webcam in the laptop and i am still in search for drivers for it.

Regards,

Shriniket Sarkar

I ran Ubuntu 9.04 on my V1320 for six weeks or so, but had a truly irritating problem in that the machine would randomly overwrite its MBR upon restart or sleep. So I switched it to XP and the same problem happened. FInally I switched it to Windows 7 RC and now release, and I've not had a single instance of MBR overwrite. I suspect that there is a timing issue or disk write cache issue that only showed up on a few Vostros (I've only seen one other complaint about this) and for some reason doesn't show up with Vista or W7 (the machine originally came with Vista).

Or, it could be that the problem has been fixed by one of the 2 (or three) BIOS updates since I got the machine in May. In any case, it works perfectly with Windows 7 (x64) with only one driver needed from Dell.

And may well work perfectly with Ubuntu and the latest BIOS update.

Rob

Ubuntu 9.10 is hugely different from 9.04 as even the file system is slightly different. it uses ext4 instead of the ext3 which was standard in 9.04 (although it had ext4 as option). I also found out that it works differently from the older Ubuntu. There will be a slight learning curve involved. It seems to only install standard drivers out of the box and will require you to connect to the net (in some fashion) to get non standard drivers. I found this only to be a slight inconvenience but on the flip side it boots up a whole load faster than either Windows or the older Ubuntu distributions. Please note also it is much easier to install either the netbook remix or the standard 9.10 than the studio version. I've yet to be successful with regards to this version of Ubuntu on a laptop.

I only have 1 small gripe about the netbook version as there are still no IMG files available for it to make a pen drive install. The way I got around that was to boot to an external CD/DVD drive with the boot CD in it. Very fast and interesting install. However I think it is now getting more windows like with the exception of the stability and security issues.

I hope this was useful and if there are any queries please do not hesitate to contact me.

The Hungry Wolf

I've installed Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS on my girlfriend's Vostro 1320 and all seems to work properly. The laptop has:

- Intel dual core T6670 processor.

- Nvidia 9300M GS

- 250Gb hard disk

- 3Gb RAM

- Dell 1510 wireless-n WLAN

- Windows XP downgrade

At first I installed new Ubuntu 9.10 and couldn't configure Broadcom wifi. I don't know why it works on 8.04, which is a year older and not in new one. I discover a problem with booting, like someone else reported, so I decided to go to 8.04, installed on my Vostro 1500 with no problems. When I installed 8.04 on the 1320 wifi just works. No problem with nvidia drivers. All works fine... but still the same problem in booting (now with grub legacy). When I start windows, something corrupts grub and then its imposible to boot, only using Super Grub Dsik or re-installing grub with a live-cd. Don't worry, I think I've fixed it. The only problem with 8.04 is that using headphones don't disable laptop speaker, but it is a minor problem and it seems to be solved as soon as I have time to search on the web.

From my experience, use the LTS if you don't want to expend time making things work. Maybe you will not have the best performance, for this you can try 9.04.

regards,

Miguel

PS. sorry about my english

i will be interested to hear how this works for you. I ultimately gave up on Ubuntu and switched to XP, but the same thing happened to XP. Finally I switched to Windows 7 and the problem has not reappeared in 6-7 weeks.

I suspect that the Vostro was designed for Vista, even though Dell provides XP drivers. There is likely a timing problem somewhere in power-down or power-up with the bios that causes this problem. Or, perhaps, that area where grub puts stage 1.5 and XP puts ?? is unused with Vista and W7.

Since I only use the OS on the laptop as a VMWare host, it doesn't matter much to me which 64-bit OS I run, as I do all my work in virtual machines.

I have the same problem on my girlfriend's vostro 1320. I discovered some interesting things: When XP (or other Windows system) is booted, grub is overwritten. The MBR is not corrupted (stage1 of grub, in the first 512B of the disk), only the stage1.5, wich is located after the MBR and has 30KB. Windows overwrite these part of the disk. The solution is to bypass stage1.5 of grub booting sequence, so it loads stage1 and then stage2, which presents the list of operating systems. To fix the problem:

1. using Ubuntu live-cd you have to restore grub: 

once you are in Ubuntu live, open the terminal and type this command in order to see the partitions of your hard disk

$ sudo fdisk -l

Locate your Ubuntu partition (something like /dev/sdax, where x is the number of the partition. if you have more than one disk, it could be sdbx, sdcx, be careful!). Then you have to mount your Ubuntu partition onto your live ubuntu:

$ sudo mount /dev/sdax /mnt (remember to set your x)

Mount all other devices

$ sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev

Execute the command chroot in order to access like root in your installed system

$ sudo chroot /mnt

Re-install grub onto your hard disk (for me was /dev/sda)

# grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

Verify that your menu.lst is OK (I'm not sure if the command is well writen because of my memory, but it's something like that)

# cd /mnt/boot/grub

# gedit menu.lst

Exit the root mode pressing Ctrl+D, exit the terminal and reboot your pc. Now grub should be restored. Don't try to use XP, wait!

2. We are going to bypass stage1.5 from the booting.

Open the terminal and take note of all your partitions. Grub has a different notation, for example 'sda' is 'hd0', 'sda5' is '(hd0,4)'

$ sudo fdisk -l

Make a backup copy of your menu.lst

$ cd /boot/grub

$ sudo cp menu.lst menu.lst.backup

Remove all files related to stage1.5

$ sudo rm *1_5

Enter into the configuration of grub

$ sudo grub

Fix the stage2 of grub at the partition of Ubuntu (example for my case - sda and sda6 my Ubuntu partiton-)

grub > root (hd0,5)

Fix mbr to the disk

grub > setup (hd0)

Exit grub configuration

grub > quit

Reboot your laptop. Now grub won't display the message 'Loading stage 1.5' and instead display your bootable operating systems.

3. After that, no problem yet when booting Windows XP.

I hope this guide helps you.

Regards,

Miguel

The reason for this is the Broadcom diver is non propriety. The way around this is to hook the laptop up to the net via wired interface RJ-45 and then do a driver update. This will download the required driver and Bob's your uncle.

Simple

Enjoy

The Hungry Wolf

I read about it before, but it didn't work for me. I conected directly to my router and then installed the Broadcom driver provided by Canonical in the 'hardware controllers' application (I don't know exactly the name of it because i'm using spanish language) . After that, the wifi led lights on my pc, but the network manager doesn't display the option to turn on the wireless. I add manually my network but it doesn't work. I tried to do 'ifup eth1' (my wireless device) to turn on with no result. Anyway, 8.04 works fine for me, although it takes more time to boot. I'm going to wait until 10.04 LTS appears. Thanks for your comment.