James Healy

Dell E4300 And Linux

05 Nov 2009

After 3.5 years of trusty service, it was time to retire my Dell Latitude D620. It was out of warranty, wouldn’t charge batteries and with a NVidia graphics card it didn’t play nice with Linux.

After considering my options (mac? lenovo?) I decided to stick with Dell. I’ve used their Latitude line for some time and enjoy the ruggedness, backed by the multi-year, next business day, onsite warranty. As a freelance web guy, it’s hard to beat having a tech visit you with 24 hours to fix a broken machine.

Wanting something slightly smaller than the D620, I settled on the Latitude E4300.

I’m a Debian guy, and had no trouble installing the testing distrubution from the netinstall CD, then dist-upgrading to unstable.

Hardware compatability is excellent - here’s what lspci -nn tells me:

    [jh@gaz Desktop]$ lspci -nn
    00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub [8086:2a40] (rev 07)
    00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
    00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a43] (rev 07)
    00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:10f5] (rev 03)
    00:1a.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:2937] (rev 03)
    00:1a.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 [8086:2938] (rev 03)
    00:1a.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 [8086:2939] (rev 03)
    00:1a.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 [8086:293c] (rev 03)
    00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:293e] (rev 03)
    00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2940] (rev 03)
    00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2942] (rev 03)
    00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 [8086:2946] (rev 03)
    00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:2934] (rev 03)
    00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:2935] (rev 03)
    00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:2936] (rev 03)
    00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 [8086:293a] (rev 03)
    00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev 93)
    00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller [8086:2917] (rev 03)
    00:1f.2 RAID bus controller [0104]: Intel Corporation Mobile 82801 SATA RAID Controller [8086:282a] (rev 03)
    00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller [8086:2930] (rev 03)
    02:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller [1180:0832] (rev 05)
    02:01.1 SD Host controller [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter [1180:0822] (rev 22)
    02:01.2 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller [1180:0843] (rev ff)
    0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 5300 AGN [Shiloh] Network Connection [8086:4235]

The following is a summary of major components and how they performed, along with any work I had to perform to get them working. I was absolutely blown away by how everything just worked. Linux compatability for Linux has come a long way in the last 3 years.

Display/Graphics

The Intel GS45 Express graphics card works fine in xorg with the xserver-xorg-video-intel package. No /etc/X11/xorg.conf file is necesary.

Thanks to the open source intel drivers, xrandr 1.2 works really well. Using a package like arandr, you can add or remove external monitors and change resolutions, all without restarting X.

Wired Ethernet

The 82567LM Intel gigabit network card works with the e1000 kernel driver.

Wireless Network

The 5300 Intel wireless card works once the firmware-iwlwifi package has been installed. This is a non-free package, make sure you have added non-free to your apt sources.

Trackpad

The trackpad works under X with no customisations.

Power

Suspend, resume and hibernate all work fine. A refreshing change after 3 years of having no support for these at all. I suspect the binary NVidia drivers were to blame, so I’m more than happy with my decision to get Intel hardware.

Audio

Alsa audio worked with no customisations. I did need to unmute the default channel.

Firewire

The firewire port worked with no customisations.

Kernel

I upgraded to the current kernel in Sid (2.6.31+22) with no issues.

Related Posts