Scott,
I got a few responses and cut and paste them into this response, see in
line below (again, these are not from me but from folks at Oracle who
are using D620s with Linux):
Good luck!
Rich
Scott Garman wrote:
Richard Soule wrote:
Oracle uses the Dell Latitude D620 laptop internally. Quite a few of us
run Linux on it. Personally I use Linux within a VMWare VM quite
frequently on a D620. (One of the downsides of being in sales support is
the pervasive use of MS stuff that ends up not working that great on
Linux. On the other hand the pay is pretty good...) We also have folks
who use it day to day on the machine itself. We have something called
the 'Oracle Base Image' that installs Red Hat Linux with everything you
need to get your job done (theoretically) for a D620. It works very well
for folks in development.
If you have specific questions then I can ask them on an internal list
that we have.
Hi Rich,
Thanks for the reply. I'm interested in running Linux natively on it,
and my concerns are primarily with the typical annoyances of running
Linux on laptops: suspend to RAM, hibernate, and wireless support.
Even on my current Sony S260, which technically supports and works with
these functions, I tend to have frequent issues which require me to
reboot the laptop at least once per week:
* Wake from suspend freezes the system (no responsiveness from anything
at all, it's entirely locked up)
* NetworkManager refuses to associate with my network. It tries but
never finishes connecting. Repeated connection attempts don't fix the
problem.
* (probably related to the previous) - NetworkManager connects to my
network, and I can use the network for a minute or two, and then I
totally lose my network connection (NetworkManager still thinks I'm
connected, though). Other times I start getting massive packet loss.
A good place for linux on laptops is the following link, which you may
have already looked at.
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/dell.html
You will see commentary for Fedora, Ubuntu, Open SuSE, Debian, and others.
Ubuntu is not the latest version of code, but they have focused on
laptop work a bit more of late.
In general laptops still suffer from the issues you raise above. Power
management (suspend/resume/hibernate) is still an issue, which Intel has
contributed code to help in current upstream kernels, but the OEMs also
need to work with the community on their docking station implementations
to improve this.
Wifi - if your flavor of the Dell laptop has the Intel 3945 - you will
need to hand tend it from sourceforge.net with all of the appropriate
firmware, kernel, and daemon support from Intel. The upstream kernel has
not accepted this solution at this time. The newer versions of Network
Manager are getting better, but still need some work.
If I spring for a new laptop, I'm hoping to resolve some of these
issues. I'm an Ubuntu user, but people running the latest release of
Fedora would probably be able to tell if recent kernels support these
options reliably.
Also, I'd like to hear general impressions of how hot/loud the laptop
gets. I tried a Core2Duo Macbook recently and found it gets
uncomfortably hot to use on my lap for long periods of time, and was
wondering if the D620 is going to exhibit the same problem.
I ran a Thinkpad T60p with a Core2Duo proc, 2 G of RAM, and it was not
any louder/hotter than my previous T30, T42, T43 running versions of
Fedora Core 3 and 5.
Thanks so much for your time,
Scott
And finally:
Which distribution are you using? You can try Ubuntu Feisty, it works
well.
Reference: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/DellLatitudeD620
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