[Eug-lug] deal at Best Buy on Toshiba notebook $249

[Jason LaPier]

Actually, my Inspiron 1501 came yesterday and it does _not_ have the
1394 port. Instead of the configuration in the image you attached, I see
the headphone and microphone jack above a SD/SDIO/MMC slot and next to
two USB ports. There is also a single PCMCIA card slot on that side, and
on the back of the laptop there are two more usb ports, a network jack
and a phone jack, and an RGB video port. (Note: there is no S-Video port
- in creating a lower-cost PC, Dell yanked some of the ports they
probably figured were fairly low use among the bulk of they're
end-users).

I booted the notebook, agreed to Dell's EULA, and then let Windows setup
load to the point where it asks you to agree to MS's EULA, to which I
said "I do not agree" (an unnecessary step, but fun anyway). 

I booted up the Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) AMD 64-bit alternate install CD -
had to force irqpoll on the boot line as per some others trying out
Ubuntu on the 1501 on the forums. There were three partitions - 75MB,
76GB, and 3.5GB - I assume the small 75MB partition is Dell stuff, so I
left it alone and deleted the 75GB winxp partition and the 3.5GB "ghost
image" partition. 

Wireless did not from the beginning, so did the install while wired.
Everything else went fine. It automatically gave me the correct
widescreen (1280x800) resolution. The forums got me about 90% through
getting ndiswrapper working (wraps Windows-based network drivers from
Dell so you can use the wifi) and spent about 45 minutes figuring out
the last 10% of it, and now it works fine.

One person still reports they can't get stand-by or hibernation to work
- my initial test of Stand-by worked fine for me (only let it stand-by
for a couple minutes) but Hibernation just seemed to hang - the screen
goes black - but not dark (despite the black-paint you can see it's
still on). 

I installed the ATI proprietary drivers following the Ubuntu community
wiki and that works fine. My only problem with the video is that the
card has 128MB native video memory, and you are supposed to be allowed
to designate up to another 128MB system memory. The Dell e1505 allows
you to do this in the BIOS - the 1501 does not (AFAIK). I assume it's a
setting that the Windows drivers allow you to configure (the Linux ATI
control panel is extremely limited). That's not a huge problem, as I
already have a gaming machine, and 128MB is more than enough video RAM
for this laptop. I'll probably put NWN on it so I can see how well
OpenGL works at some point.

So far I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing that bugs me about the
design is it's got one of those Truelife screens or whatever they are -
and this makes colors really pop, videos are great.... _but_, if there
happens to be a lamp sitting behind you, you'll see it reflect on the
screen. If I had the choice when I ordered it, I think I would have
opted not to get the truelife - I'll be doing more coding than
video-watching on this (however, I will say, under low-light conditions
it's actually a lot easier to read than my old laptop).

- Jason



> -----Original Message-----
> From: euglug-bounces at euglug.org 
> [mailto:euglug-bounces at euglug.org] On Behalf Of dooger watts
> Sent: Monday, November 27, 2006 12:17 PM
> To: Eugene Unix and Gnu/Linux User Group
> Subject: Re: [Eug-lug] deal at Best Buy on Toshiba notebook $249
> 
> Finally tracked down the manual; here's a screengrab:
> 
> Michael Miller wrote:
> > Firewire I.E. IEEE 1394 seems to be standard on most of 
> Dell's laptop 
> > lines.  I purchesed a 1505 for my wife and it has firewire on it.
> > Looking at the tech specs for the 1501 Firewire and or IEEE 
> 1394 are 
> > not listed.  It looks like they are only offering firewire with the 
> > higher end laptops.
> 
> 
>