Arch Linux

Los Frijoles

Member

Registered: 2012-06-23

Posts: 40

Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series

I have an acer aspire one that has been trucking along for nearly 6 years now with almost continuous use (about a year of non-use time in there, but that's it). I use it primarily for taking notes in class and such, but it also sees a lot of programming and other use since I take it to campus each day and also on trips. In this time, I have lost almost all the feet and now screws are slowly disappearing. It also has started to have some overheating issues when the heatsink seems to shift positions slightly (it shuts off within 90 seconds when this happens). In addition, I find myself wishing quite often that it could do things like stream video properly (without jittering) and compile the kernel (it takes FOREVER on that tiny hyper threaded single core atom processor). So, I've been looking at a replacement that can get similar battery life, has a similarly sized screen (preferably touch as well because I think that would be great fun to use), more than 1Gb of RAM (I can have about 7 tabs open on chrome and then it starts having troubles since I have swap disabled), and a better processor. My most basic requirement, however, is that the laptop be able to run arch.

I've been looking at the Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series since it seems to have the best battery life of my various 11.6" options out there. The processor is a dual core Celeron which sounds old and antiquated to me, even though I believe its based on Haswell (not sure there). It also has 4Gb RAM and 500Gb hard drive. Another option, for $50 more, is a pentium processor which sounds even more antiquated, but is still based on Haswell.

http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-11-31 … redir=true

My question is this: Has anyone managed to get arch working on one of these things? I also imagine that the most new-fangled component would be the touchscreen, so does anyone know the general support of those for linux?

Thanks in advance for any help.

superscript18

Member

Registered: 2015-08-04

Posts: 1

Re: Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series

For Googlers, I am writing this on an Inspiron 11 3137 (Pentium, 4GB) with Arch working great.

Arch (and Ubuntu) installation and running has been mostly great--everything is supported.  Only complaints are a freezy, glitchy, half-broken, be-better-off-totally-broken touchpad.  I don't think this is Arch's fault since it's not much better in Windows.  It might be my fault since it wasn't bad until a few months ago, who knows.  Oh well.  WiFi/touchscreen/bluetooth have support, suspend/resume work, battery life is good.

Hope this helps someone even though it's late for you, @LosFrijoles.

Go Arch!