Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on Dell XPS M1330

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

So Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex turned out to be a bad experience on my dell m1330. Many things that worked out of the box with Hardy heron got broken on Ibex. Things like Finger print reader, bluetooth, Graphic Display, Audio, all had one problem or the other. I was able to walk around most of the issues, although some were just unfix-able (like the screen corruption that i get when i enable compositing metacity or compiz) could not be fixed.

When Jaunty alpha6 was announced with many folks on identica claiming it to be very stable i decided to make the switch. I have since been running Ubuntu jaunty jackalope on my laptop. People say that the grass on the other side is always greener,well that was how running jaunty on my dell m1330 turned out. It wasn’t perfect and although i noticed many improvements from intrepid ibex like faster boot, better notification system, better support for suspense and hibernation, they were also some huge show spoiler like the Intel graphic regression which seem to affect the Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) graphic chipset the most, causing the system to hard freeze requiring me to have to manually power down the machine. This issue got really bad that i had to downgrade to ubuntu hardy heron (which ran perfectly on my system) while i waited for walk rounds to the problem.
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Upgrade / Downgrade your Dell Bios On Ubuntu

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

Updating or Downgrading your Bios is pretty straight forward on Ubuntu. Ok maybe not as straight forward as double clinking to install. But not that difficult all the same.

for this guide we will be using the commandline. But that should not scare you, i have tried to make the guide as easy as possible. first we open Terminal /Application/Accessories/Terminal
Now since we will be running every command as root(as administrator), we sould need to become an admin. so that we wont need to been adding sudo infront of every command. so first copy and paste this in terminal
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How to make M1330's eject button work with Ubuntu

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

One problem i had with my dell is not really a critical issue more of an annoyance. The fancy eject button just above my the dell’s keyboard those not work. I would have to manually right click and eject any mounted cd from its icon on the desktop. it would make my life easier if solved. well i have found a solution

open terminal
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