Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

[andybleaden]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

I got one from play.com for £99..19" thing..nothing special but it is a flat screen thing...not got one at the mo and could not afford the space or cost of a bigger one. So stuck with it...even forgot the name...er might be a ( had to look it up on me order form) Acer AL1916WDS 19" Widescreen LCD Monitor... erone of them!

[andybleaden]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

hey this flat screen from acer was a doddle to set up and worked first time with kubuntu which was great. Looks good too!

First test passed!

[MoonRise]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

I was originally going to say that I've used Acer Monitors before and was impressed with them, but didn't want to Jinx anything. Glad to hear the first hurdle was passed.

[andybleaden]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

yes it was dead simple...worked straight away and then I configured it under system settings>monitors>hardware>detect monitor...match the numbers and way it went. I had to restart X and it worked a treat.

[andybleaden]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

Well I survived!

Just

Had a few sound problems but seem sorted I think for now as I had to configure the sound card/system

Made the largest cock up as I selected a dvorak keyboard layout...aghhh!!!!

Spent half an hour sorting that one ...using a picture of one to reinstall a us qwerty one...aghhhh...dell did not do a stupidity test

Had to take a few unwanted (loads) of programmes off

But ...I am still here...music is on...and I will probably spend the next week sorting bits and pieces

Andy

[bootdoc]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

sorry I am late to the polls. I would have said build your own desktop. I built one that kicks for about $300 bucks. AMD athlon64, 2gigs ram, nvidia graphics, dvd w/lightscribe. Got all the parts from newegg. Sold it for 500.

I tried to buy a lappy from dell yesterday. They would not sell me one with out an OS. I won't be going back to dell ever again. I found a toshiba dual amd64, ati graphics 3gigs ram for $429.00. After the windows tax rebate it should $229.00 read here
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7040

[andybleaden]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

Well it is going pretty cool

The only hassle i have now I have sorted the sound out is the suspend mode which does not seem to work..goes off...will not come back on....any ideas

[MoonRise]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

I have had that issue before when using suspend. Never really figured it out as I never really use Suspend that much, if at all. I'll look around and see if I can find any info on that.

[tinker]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

Well it is going pretty cool

The only hassle i have now I have sorted the sound out is the suspend mode which does not seem to work..goes off...will not come back on....any ideas

This might turn out to be one of those places where a bit more troubleshooting information can help. I'm assuming you're trying to suspend to disk.

Are you expecting the lid switch to trigger resume?
Does it not resume from a power switch event?
Is your swap partition (or file, whichever you use) of sufficient size to hold the contents of RAM?
Does anything happen? "Will not come back on" is difficult to visualise if one isn't in the room looking at the console.

[andybleaden]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

sorry late night moan!

What I meant was that my desktop will no restart (pressing the power button) if I have suspended it via the suspend option. It hangs I guess somewhere in x

So I am using the power button on the front of the pc to restart or I guess the right term is resume

No it does not resume from a power swith but hangs in x

I have a 4gb ram pc

It hangs in a black screen with processes being listed out with lots of numbers and things I have never seen before ( I am guessing it is the x system)

Any help?

[tinker]

Re: Dell Inspiron 530 with ubuntu...should I buy

Well, this hasn't worked out so well for me or should I say us. Because it seemed like an interesting problem, I borrowed a Dell, not the same model as yours (older) but I hoped it would be okay to test with.

Darn, hibernate didn't work for me either. I tried both suspend to RAM and suspend to disk. I was calling the scripts from the command line but I don't think that would be substantially different from clicking a button.

When I booted it to Debian (stable, Etch), hibernate did work with both sleep and suspend to disk, so the hardware is capable. Since yours is newer, it likely is too.

I did see a post in a list that suggested disabling GLX with an ATI video interface but I don't know if that would apply to your system. He said that made his hibernate work. The latest symptoms you mention sound like they could be something along the line of video. Sometimes the very last line printed on the screen as the system hangs can be helpful to figuring out what caused the hang. It does sound like your system is trying to come back, I haven't been able to get this one to to even try to resume yet.

You might try, from the run dialogue box:
sudo /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh and see if anything different happens.

I will keep reading through the scripts and following along to see if I can figure anything out that could help. If I have any luck I will post again. However, if the Etch kernel (2.6.18) can do it, it will probably be working here eventually. I am not a kernel expert, so if I ever do figure out what is different, it will probably not be soon. And I can't keep this laptop unless I buy it.