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Sun, 12 Nov 2006

Dell Inspiron e1405

After my old laptop, an Asus M2400Ne broke, I had to get a new one. Since the mobile Intel Core 2 Duo processors (Merom) had just come out, I wanted to get a laptop with one. I bought the Dell Inspiron e1405, and installed Gentoo Linux on it.

The specs of the system I bought are:

Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 processor (dual core, 2.0 GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 4 MB L2 cache)

2 GB 533 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (2 DIMMS)

120 GB 5400 RPM SATA hard drive

8x DVD+/-RW dual layer optical drive

14.1" WXGA+ (1440x900) "TrueLife" (glossy coated) LCD

Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950

Integrated 10/100 Ethernet

Integrated Conexant modem

Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 WiFi card (802.11a/b/g)

Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth module (2.0 + EDR)

As to the system itself, it is reasonably well built. It's not a tank, and it's definitely a notch below the Latitude notebooks (which have the same internal hardware but more solid cases), but it is reasonably solid.

The display is amazing. Some people don't like the glossy coating, and I admit it can cause glare in a room with bright lights, but under most conditions it is absolutely beautiful. The dimmest brightness level on this display is a little dimmer than the brightest on my old laptop, and despite some complaints that there is a light leak near the bottom, I haven't seen such a problem.

The keyboard is decent. I liked the arrangement of the editing keys on my Asus better (they were in a column going down the right side of the keyboard: Home-PgUp-PgDn-End). The touch of the keyboard is on the mushy side of what I find comfortable. The touchpad is a Synaptics touchpad, with multiple finger detection. The two buttons are a little mushy, but I rarely use them, opting instead for tapping on the pad itself or, more often, using the keyboard.

The graphics are ho-hum, but you should be expecting this, because they're integrated graphics. I'm not a gamer, and I wanted a smaller machine with more battery life, so I was happy with this. If you play a lot of games, you should upgrade to the Inspiron e1505, which is Dell's 15.4" version of this laptop.

The speakers are quite nice for laptop speakers. They are still somewhat lacking in bass, as most laptop speakers are, but they have good midrange and decent bass, instead of okay midrange and no bass like my previous laptop. I haven't had any problems with the integrated sound card, and I would recommend skipping the "HD Audio" upgrade, as it is entirely software and unlikely to do much to improve the sound.

The battery life is pretty awesome, especially if you opt for the 9-cell, 85 WHr battery, which I strongly recommend. It ranges widely depending on the power management settings you use, and how much CPU power you use. If I'm doing something computationally heavy, like compiling software, I will get 2 or 3 hours of battery life. (This might not sound like much, but the processor is insanely fast--it built Firefox 2.0 in 22 minutes, 6 seconds!) If I turn the brightness down, slow the CPU, spin the hard drive down, and turn off WiFi and Bluetooth, I can get close to 8 hours of battery life, and easily 6 hours.

The second half of this post will detail my experience installing Gentoo Linux on the Dell Inspiron e1405:

Rather than giving you a huge list of everything I did to the system after getting it, I will simply list any pertinent information about configuring each component.

Processor: Use the speedstep_centrino module.

Hard drive: Shows up as /dev/sda. Use the ata_piix driver.

Optical drive: Shows up as /dev/sr0. Uses the same driver as the hard drive. If you're using a kernel older than 2.6.18, be sure not to build the IDE/ATAPI driver for this chipset, because it will claim the optical drive before the ata_piix driver does, and DMA won't work, so the drive will be hellishly slow and the system will practically hang while reading or burning lots of data.

Touchpad: Use the psmouse driver in the console, and the synaptics driver for X.org. You might want to turn the speed up a little, since it seems sluggish by default.

Ethernet: Use the b44 driver.

Modem: Untested. Sorry. I think that buying the Conexant drivers from LinuxAnt might work.

WiFi: Use the ipw3945 driver. It's in Portage, as net-wireless/ipw3945.

Bluetooth: Use the hci_usb driver.

Graphics: Use the intel-agp and i915 kernel modules, and the i810 X.org driver. You'll need the 915resolution utility to add the native 1440x900 resolution to the mode table. If you want native 1440x900 resolution in the console, you can do the following:
Using a Gentoo-patched kernel, such as gentoo-sources, build the vesafb-tng driver as a module.

Add the 915resolution service to the boot runlevel.
Create a new init script, /etc/init.d/fixvideo, containing the following:
depend() {
        after 915resolution
        before consolefont xdm
}

start() {
        modprobe vesafb-tng mode=1440x900-32;
}
Add the fixvideo service to the default runlevel.
When the system boots, it will start in the default 640x480 mode, patch the mode table with 915resolution, and then load the vesafb-tng module when fixvideo starts.

If the graphics don't come back on after you have closed the lid, you need to add the following to /etc/acpi/default.sh, after the first ;; after power):
        lid)
                if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid//state > /dev/null; then
                        vbetool dpms on;
                else
                        vbetool dpms off;
                        #xset dpms force off
                fi
                ;;
This works for me.

Sound: Use the snd-hda-intel module. I recommend installing the latest versions of the alsa-* packages, since the HD Audio drivers are constantly being updated.

This is all I can think of in terms of how to get Gentoo working on this laptop. If you're having trouble with something, or I forgot to explain something, feel free to drop me an email.

Note: I installed the x86 version of Gentoo on this machine, even though it could support the x86_64 (a.k.a. amd64) architecture as well. On the Gentoo Wiki there is a description of how to install Gentoo AMD64 on the Inspiron e1405. I have tried installing it, but I ran into a showstopping problem where, unless I disabled ACPI (which is important), it hung when I closed the lid.

Related: TuxMobil Linux Laptop and Notebook Installation Survey.

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Sun, 12 Nov 2006

Dell Inspiron e1405

posted on Nov 12, 2006 at 16:41 in /reviews/hardware | permalink