Linux for Latitude D410

Question

Hey, I was thinking of buying a latitude 410 , which they look great, and I was wondering which distribution of linux do you recommend me to install.  I was thinking of Debian but I do not know if I will encounter any hardware conflict with it. I really do not want to go into much trouble. I 've never installed Linux before, eventhough I have been using Red Hat for six months at the University, along with Sun Solaris.   The thing is that, eventhough I 've learnd everything I know today about computers from Microsoft, which I do not have anything against them, I want to go Linux since I am very comfortable with it.   But I really, really do not want to fight the hardware since it would require lots of time that I rather spend in doing something else. Microsoft would be the easiest way to go, but I do think that as a customer if I can choose the brand of computer with its memory, hard drives, audio cards and so on, I should be able ALSO to choose the OS, no?   I read that many D610 users encountered many problems of compatibiliy, so now I am afraid of making a wrong choice. If it is not possible or extremely difficult to make work the D 410 under Linux Debian, Red Hat or whatever I rather buy an Apple with its new OS Tiger.    Could somebody help me Please? Thank you so much for your understanding.

CartmanBro · Answer

I hear you on that. I have a D610 running Slackware 10.1 linux. I did have problems installing, but I fixed it after a few hours by recompiling the kernel. For your
D410, you can find the answers to most of your problems. But how long it will take,
depends on how much linux you know.

I would recommend distros like Fedora, Mandrake, or Suse for somone new to the scene like you. I definitely won't recommend Debian or Slackware though.

I'm a big linux user, but I still do a Windows and Linux dual boot. I only go linux-only with desktops.

luskwater · Answer

I have SuSE Linux v9.3 running on a D410. I'm using it happily, but there are a few problems I've encountered: the internal wireless (Dell TrueMobile 1350/Broadcom BM4306) can only be used via ndiswrapper and the Windows driver. This occasionally causes lock-ups during boot (seems to be mostly on battery power). once the internal wireless shuts down (which Fn-F2 will do), I don't know how to toggle it back on. Not normally a problem, but can be irritating. When I close the lid, the system goes into some odd state; I can't get the screen to reappear/turn on again when I open the lid. I've played with various ACPI settings (through YAST, the set-up tool), but haven't discovered a cure yet. While the MediaBase and Auxiliary Port Replicator (APR) both work for USB, power, network (apparently), I can't get the audio jacks on either one to respond. The Alps GlidePoint mouse (and the touchpad) did strange things under v9.2; they work acceptably under v9.3 (but the glidepoint and extra mouse buttons seem to become inactive after returning from 'Suspend to Disk'. Other than this, I've found it a good host for Linux. Oh, yes, one more thing: don't ever use the default 'FailSafe' boot from the default SuSE installation. I'm not sure what setting does it ('nodma'? 'noacpi'?) but it will reliably corrupt my filesystem beyond repair, so the rescue tools report bad blocks on the disk. The only solution I was able to find was reformat and reinstall.

cmfa · Answer

I'm thinking about buying a Latitude D410. Now I'm just wondering if booting from the cd/dvd drive in the MediaBase went without any trouble? I havn't found much info at all about the MediaBase by the way.

/Fred

luskwater · Answer

I had no trouble booting from the MediaBase...time after time after time. :-)

The repetition was because I didn't know that the Linux Failsafe Boot was trashing my disk (or my filesystem), so I installed SuSE 9.2 once or twice and 9.3 once or twice while experimenting.

It worked very well, no problems at all, and that was with the double-sided or double-depth or whatever DVD they provide.

cederber · Answer

I also have a D410, and have the same problem when closing the lid (running Debian Sarge). However, if I switch to a different virtual console when opening the lid, things come back to life. I can then switch back to the original virtual console and continue as normal. Still annoying, but a lot better than not being able to close the lid at all.

Specifically, I typically have the X server running on virtual console 7. So after opening the lid I do Ctrl-Alt-F3 (say) and then Ctrl-Alt-F7 and I'm back in business.

Anybody have Fn-Esc/Fn-F1 working for Stand by/Hibernate?

luskwater · Answer

I've tried the Ctrl-Alt-Fn method to switch to a console tty and back; has not worked at all for me, as I recall. I've heard about it before. I believe there is a way to put that command in as a post-wakeup command in ACPI settings so it will automatically switch to tty2 and then back to the X display. Not sure where I've seen that, however.

directhex · Answer

I've had superb results with Ubuntu 5.04, typing from my D410 right now.

Out of the box, the following work fine:

IPW2200 wireless
DRI 3D acceleration
Suspend-To-Disk (requires large Swap partition)
Synaptics driver
Audio

Suspend-To-RAM required removing a comment from /etc/default/acpi-support

Changing the lid close behaviour from screen blank to STR required editing /etc/acpi/events/lidbtn

What DIDN'T work is the VGA output (I have another thread with a solution) - that said, I haven't tried the modem, the cardbus, or any of the fn-Fxx keys, other than the non-functional fn-F8

Message Edited by directhex on 06-17-2005 10:24 PM

peydude · Answer

Hi,

I am also using the Broadcom Windows drivers with ndiswrapper under Gentoo. I also experience the lockups during boot (always on battery power). It happens when wlan0 is being activated. If you ever find a solution to this please let me know.

I am thinking that it might be the init script that activates the wireless connection. The reason I say that is:

I used to have a custom script that would detect and activate the connection and now I am using the ones provided by my distribution. When I was using my custom script I experienced lockups but was able to debug and fix it. It turned out that the Broadcom card would find the access point (using 'iwlist' you could see it on the scanned list) but could not connect to it.

This would happen if I were far from the access point. To solve this I modified my script to set the SSID and WEP key, then it would check iwconfig to see if they were set correctly. If not it would report an error.

Now with Gentoo's init script I experience lock ups every once in a while. Another problem I noticed is that if you use the Dell Quickset in windows to disable wireless (it's one of the Quickset power schemes) then you can't enable it with any other method (fn keys or windows xp utils). Mine was set to disable wireless everytime i switched to battery power.

monlinux · Answer

I've had a D410 for quite a while, most things work, though information is scarce.

Booting and installing from the MediaBay works fine, no problem.

Something that disappoints is the lack of support for the built-in smartcard reader due to lack of information/support from TI on the chipset(s).

Under FC3 the lid closed video blanking and then ALT-CTRL-Fn then ALT-F7 trick worked but it now fails to work under OpenSuse 10.0. Haven't bothered to look into it as I haven't had the time.

The 2915 wireless chipset works fine out of the box.

Audio playbackworks speaker and headphones, except I can't get Audio CDs to play out the speaker or headphones from the MediaBay... if you've got this to work, let me know how. I end up having to rip them to play them back via PCM...

Screen brightness (Fn-Arrows), Wireless (Fn-F2) and Power (initiate shutdown) buttons work. Volume control could work if I could be bothered to bind the keys.

Fn-F3 (battery) could be setup to print something onscreen with OSD.
Fn-F8 doesn't seem to do anything. Assume need to setup xorg.conf manually.

Only thing that really annoys is the lack of CD audio playback from the mediabay. Strange that mediabay headphone jack doesn't seem to work but stops speaker playback. Right side headphone jack works fine.

Linux General

Linux for Latitude D410

Was this post helpful?