Arch Linux

banana989

Member

Registered: 2004-06-03

Posts: 60

Dell Inspiron E1505

I just purchased this laptop and I'm expecting it to come in within the next week. Right now I am doing some preliminary research to help my setup time when I reformat ( or maybe dual boot ) it to Arch.

X.org - I have seen a few people mention 915resolution, what is this? I want to get the best looking resolution out of imy LCD that I can. I am also considering putting XGL on as well - you know , to impress the ladies.

Bluetooth- bluez-libs & bluez-utils . Are these the only things I will need to get bluetooth running ?

Wifi- I am under the impression that the ipw3945 is available or built into the kernel for native wifi support.

Touchpad - though I will probably use the bluetooth mouse most, is it possible to get the "scroll lines" on it to work under X ?

Battery Life / Power Saving I Saw that there is a package called laptop-mode that runs as a daemon. I definately want to optimize my battery life, will this package automagically do it for me ?

If anybody has experience working with this laptop or one similiar I would appreciate info about your setups. Thanks !

Here are some of my relavent system specs...

· Inspiron E1505, Intel Core 2 Duo processor T5500 (2MB/1.66GHz/667MHz)       

· 15.4 Inch UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-screen WSXGA+, for Inspiron 6400/E1505    

· 1GB, DDR2, 533MHz 2 Dimm for Inspiron 6400/E1505    

· 128MB ATI MOBILITY RADEON X1300 HyperMemory, for Inspiron 6400/E1505

· Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module (2.0 + EDR),for Inspiron

· Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini Card (54Mbps) for Inspiron 6400/E1505

Neuro

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2005-10-12

Posts: 352

Re: Dell Inspiron E1505

Bluetooth:
I've got a Asus A6JC here, which has a Bluetooth internal device attached to it's USB bus. All I needed to do was load hci_usb and configure hci.conf according to the Gentoo Bluetooth guide. Also the bluez-* packages in Arch are a bit old, the latest version is 3.5 so you should make your own packages. There are some issues, but you'll find some of them resolved in this thread

Wifi
For ipw3945 you'll need the ipw3945 (kernel module), ipw3945-ucode (binary code) and ipw3945d (regulatory daemon) packages. They work fine out of the box with wpa_supplicant nicely supporting WEP, WPA and WPA2. netcfg (look into /etc/network-profiles) is also nice for handling connections.

If you want to put the device into monitor mode (for testing network security ), however, you'll need to build your custom kernel patched by the ipw3945 sources for CONFIG_IEEE80211_RADIOTAP and the ipw3945 module itself.

Touchpad
It works well out of the box (you propably have a synaptics one). Package synaptics is your friend here. Look around the net to see how to configure it (Gentoo Harware - synaptics). You'll propably want to calibrate it using synclient for the RIGHT_EDGE and RB_BUTTON values though.

Powersaving
Oh yes, laptop-mode is nice if you set it up properly. Also check out cpufreqd for processor frequency scaling and hibernate-scripts (check Arch wiki) for software suspend2disk (suspend2) support. It all works pretty nicely here.

You also might want to try out powersaved and kpowersave which is a unified all-in-one solution. However I found it a bit unstable (for example it didn't scale the second core of my Core Duo) and a bit hard to configure.