December 2007
Good (but expensive) laptop. Screen not huge, but sufficient, and very clear (not glossy, you can work with some light behind yourself). Keyboard is comfortable.
Almost everything works, after some time configuring it. didn't get suspend-to-Disk to work, and did not test bluetooth, the internal modem and the CD/DVD burner (yet).
No kernel recompilation, but I had to use some non-free modules (the wifi driver ipw3945 relies on a piece of non-free software).
The touchpad was incredibly slow. This made it more usable (in /etc/X11/xorg.conf):
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.5" # touchpad speed when moving slowly
Option "MaxSpeed" "2.0" # touchpad speed when moving fast
Option "AccelFactor" "0.10"
Option "CircularScrolling" "on"
Option "EdgeMotionMinSpeed" "0.5"
EndSection
qsynaptics or gsynaptics can help too
Suspend-to-Disk (aka "Hibernate") doesn't work for me. The system resumes right after starting to hibernate, or doesn't resume.
Suspend-to-RAM (aka "Suspend") works, but you have to stop the wifi daemon manually before :
sudo ipw3945d-2.6.22-14-generic --kill
Then, for example, Menu System -> Quit -> Suspend. Around 5 seconds later, the laptop is almost off, with the power light blinking slowly. Press the power button to resume
Adding the following line to /etc/hibernate/common.conf allows me to simply run sudo hibernate to hibernate :
OnSuspend 10 ipw3945d-2.6.22-14-generic --kill
Sound didn't work out-of-the-box. But I got a simple solution :
sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
Ajouter la ligne
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m42
Overhead projector worked for me. You might need to play a bit with screen resolution (see grandr, or the "Display Geometry Switcher applet from the gnome-randr-applet package). When the laptop screen resolution is different from the overhead's one, with OpenOffice, you need to start OpenOffice with only the overhead activated, and then only press Fn + f8 to get feedback on the laptop's screen. Otherwise, OpenOffice will try fullscreen badly centered.