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.

Then Dell released their custom image for ubuntu jaunty jackalope with some customization of their own that fixed issues many dell laptops had with ubuntu jaunty jackalope (mostly audio issues) and i decided it was time to give jaunty another try.

I downloaded the dell image from here

The good thing about this dell image for ubuntu is that unlike the previous ubuntu images released by dell were the user didn’t have a say in the partitioning process of the system. This image actually allows the user to partition the system to their taste. So its possible to dual-boot between windows and linux on this version of dell ubuntu reinstall image, a thing which was impossible with previous versions.

After installing the dell installing the dell jaunty jackalope image am happy to say that ubuntu jaunty jackalope is shaping up to be one of the best ubuntu i have ever used. very smooth and solid as a rock. It still has some nagging issues out of the box, but most of this issues have simple fixes and work around which when applied made ubuntu 9.04 rock on my dell m1330.

NB: I would recommend that anybody intending to install the ubuntu jaunty jackalope on their dell xps (or in fact any dell should consider using the dell-jaunty-reinstall-iso which can be downloaded here you can read more about the advantages of the dell-reinstall-image over the vanilla ubuntu from this post

what works
Intel core 2 Duo T5850 (2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB cache)
Just works

Standard Display with 2.0 Megapixel Webcam
Just works

Speed: 320GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) with Free Fall Sensor
Just works

Integrated 10/100 Network Card
Just works

Modem
Not Tested

CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW Drive)
Just works

High Definition Audio 2.0
just works (had issues with recording on vanilla ubuntu but the dell reinstall image works fine out of the box even with pulse audio)

Intel® 3945 802.11a/g Mini-card
Just works

56Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell)
Just works

Biometric Fingerprint Reader
works (not out of the box)

Built-in Bluetooth capability (2.0 EDR)
Just works

Standard LCD
Just works

Internal mic
Just works

Memory card reader
Just works

Issues

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is by no means a perfect out of the box experience on my m1330 i had serious issues with stability and general usability.

where are some of the issues and how i was able to get round them

Issue 1

X freezes due to regression in the Intel graphic driver for jaunty.
This was a huge show stopper for me. it just made my laptop unusable. I usually experience a like 10 freezes in a day, and each time the best way to get out of it was to manually power down the machine. The problem with the Intel graphic driver is upstream and not an ubuntu specific problem. and unfortunately the hardest hit is the Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) which is what my laptop uses.

Walk around
I was able to get round the frequent X display crashes by enabling something called greedy mode in my xorg.conf file. Doing this is very easy.

first we backup our xorg.conf its always a good idea to do this so we can always restore back to default in case things did work out right for you

Backup xorg.conf
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf-bak

now that we have the default xorg.conf backed up we can now safely edit it by adding the following to the device section of xorg.conf

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy

first we open the file with a text editor

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

now we edit the device section of the file to look like this

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# Note that some configuration settings that could be done previously
# in this file, now are automatically configured by the server and settings
# here are ignored.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
Device “Configured Video Device”
SubSection “Display”
Virtual 2720 900
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
Option “AccelMethod” “EXA”
Option “MigrationHeuristic” “greedy”
EndSection

**As you can see from above, I just added
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy
to the device section ***

Once this is done we save and close the file. Changes would be applied on next login.

Issue 2

Desktop Effect is disabled by default on the Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
so laptops running that particular Intel card would not be able run compiz on ubuntu jaunty jackalope. I was able to get round this issue bt removing my Intel Driver from the blacklist. To do this run the

Walk around
Desktop effect/ Compiz was disabled to reduce the rate of X freezes on Intel card GM65/GL960 cards. However applying the workaround in Issue 1 makes the system stable enough to run compiz. Since enabling Greedy mode in the previous work around eliminate the freezes anyway removing the GM65/GL960 from blacklist meant compiz started working without any issues and system is still just as rock solid .. talk about eating my cake and having it.

Removing the Intel card GM65/GL960 from compiz blacklist is dead easy. open Terminal and run the following commands

gksudo gedit /usr/bin/compiz


this would open a text file, search for the following line in the text file # blacklist based on the pci ids


under that you would see the following of lines

T="$T 8086:2982 8086:2992 8086:29a2 8086:2a02 8086:2a12" # intel 965
T="$T 8086:2a02 " # Intel GM965

you need to add a comment “#” in-front of which line to look like this


#T="$T 8086:2982 8086:2992 8086:29a2 8086:2a02 8086:2a12" # intel 965
#T="$T 8086:2a02 " # Intel GM965

Once that is done. log out and login into the system and try to enable desktop effect. It should work like a charm

Issue 3

Finger Print reader: Thinkfinger the tool which would help us to use our finger print reader for authentication is still broken in the repositories.

Walk around

We would have to install one from a third party PPA. Open Synaptic System/Administration/Synaptic
go to settings/Repositories and choose the Third-Pary Software tab Click add (not add CD-ROM) and add the following

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jon-oberheide/ubuntu jaunty main
when you are done click add source and close the the software sources tab.

Now we need to add the PPA key (This is a good practice from a security stand point as it ensures that anything you are installing is actually from the right repository if you skip this part you will get errors every time you refresh your sources)

Open the terminal and run the following command

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xf2a12fabe936a7bbdc4ea33351db180d1323e149

now click the reload button on synaptic. once its done refreshing, search for the following: thinkfinger-tools and libpam-thinkfinger right click install and apply and once its done. the first part is installed

We are now going to configure how to use the finger print reader for authentication. to do this we would have to edit some configuration file on the system. first we run the following command

sudo '/usr/lib/pam-thinkfinger/pam-thinkfinger-enable'

Then we need to restart the system for the changes to take effect. Once you are logged in Open Terminal again and store your finger print on the computer with this command

tf-tool --acquire

swap your finger of choice 3 times

to test run this

tf-tool --verify

then you are done. from now on you can use your finger print for
a) GDM session login
b) Screensaver unlock
c) Sudo and gksudo prompts
d) PolicyKit authorization

Issue 4

Inability to run Desktop effect / Compiz on a Dual Monitor setup : There is a hardware limitation of Intel cards which prevent them from from running hardware acceleration at a resolution higher than 2048 x 2048 virtual size. Fortunately this hardware limitation does not affect the Intel GM965 Chipset, unfortunately the Driver shipped with Jaunty (and previous versions ubuntu if i might add) has a bug that limit the Intel GM965 to just 2048 x 2048 virtual size when running hardware acceleration, which in human language means you can run compiz, and you can setup dual monitor, you just cant do both at the same.

Walk Around Fortunately there is a fix for this bug. To apply this fix we would to add a 3rd party PPA to our source.list and install the mesa package which contains the fix. after which we can then remove the PPA from our source list.

echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cavedon/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Then we add the PPA key and refresh our sources
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x282e4fae542e7613e2dc4056c1fe1a7b426ff7fa ; sudo apt-get update

It would have been easy if you just do an upgrade in which case install latest update. But since i wasnt too sure about some of the packages in from this PPA and what i need is just his mesa packages which contains the fix we need, I would suggest the only package we upgrade to should be mesa. Hence open synaptic package manager and search for the following packages. right click on them and select upgrade

libgl1-mesa-dri
libgl1-mesa-glx
libglu1-mesa
mesa-utils

when you are done. click apply and install the upgrade you have selected.
Once the upgrade is complete. I would advise you remove the PPA from your sources. You can do this by going to settings in synaptic and click on repositories. Click on the Third Party Software tab and scroll down till you see the deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cavedon/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main, uncheck it and close. Now you will need to click reload to refresh your sources.

Conclusion
After applying the following simple fix, My Dell as been solid as a rock, no more freezes and i get an optimum use of my hardware.

Hope someone finds this useful

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

sudo bash

hit enter and give your passwd.

you will see your prompts change from
this :~$ to :~#

Then we need to install Libsmbios a linux package in the Ubuntu repositories.

apt-get install libsmbios-bin

once installed we need to get the system ID to get hat run this in terminal
getSystemId

you should get an output that looks like this

System ID: 0x0209
Service Tag: 4MV9HH1
Express Service Code: 10089895861
Product Name: XPS M1330
BIOS Version: A14
Vendor: Dell Inc.
Is Dell: 1

from the above output my system ID is 0×0209. Armed with this information you now need to get the BIOS version want to upgrade / downgrade. you can get it from here. http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bios-hdrs
Scroll down the list to find a directory matching the System ID from the previous step. and look for the bios version that you want to upgrade/downgrade to In my case my directory is named: system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x0209_version_a14/ my system ID IS 0×0209 and the version of bios i wanted was A14.
Go into this directory and download the file, “bios.hdr” and save it in your desktop.

Now we load the load the dell_rbu driver

modprobe dell_rbu

For Updating

now to update the bios we move into the directory were we saved the bios.hdr file. if you saved it in your desktop. just do this

cd $HOME/Desktop

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR SYSTEM IS PLUGGED TO A POWER SOURCE AND NOT ON BATTERY.

Then we run the update command.

dellBiosUpdate -u -f ./bios.hdr

if all goes well you would see the following feedback

Supported RBU type for this system: (MONOLITHIC)
Using RBU v2 driver. Initializing Driver.
Setting RBU type in v2 driver to: MONOLITHIC
Prep driver for data load.
Writing RBU data (4096bytes/dot): ............................
..............................................................
.......................
Notify driver data is finished.
Activate CMOS bit to notify BIOS that update is ready on next boot.
Update staged sucessfully. BIOS update will occur on next reboot.


If you are Downgrading

for downgrading to a previous BIOS version.

your downgrade command would be

dellBiosUpdate --override_bios_version -u -f ./bios.hdr

Now that you are done updating /downgrading

we would need to tell the system to do a cold reboot which is what is needed after doing a bios update.

to do this we would need to edit the kernel line in your menu.lst

run this in terminal

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
look for the kernel line

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic
uuid f5e0a891-61ec-434a-b935-78bc25b1542e
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-9-generic root=UUID=f5e0a891-61ec-434a-b935-78bc25b1542e ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-9-generic

and add reboot=bios to the end of the kernel line to look like this

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic
uuid f5e0a891-61ec-434a-b935-78bc25b1542e
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-9-generic root=UUID=f5e0a891-61ec-434a-b935-78bc25b1542e ro quiet reboot=bios splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-9-generic

save and close the text editor

now you can reboot your machine

once the system restart it would display a white screen which some messages displaying what its doing. and your bios boot splash might take a while. but that is fine.

once restarted. be sure to remove the “reboot=bios” from your kernel line.

I used this method to update the BIOS of my dell xps m1330 ( and downgraded it once) and it worked fine without any ( as we Nigerians will say) Whahala or problem.
Hope this helps some one.

open terminal

Application/Accessories/Terminal

and run this command.

sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

now add this line to the bottom of the config text file that opens

# allow eject of cdrom using eject button
dev.cdrom.lock=0

save and close.

The eject botton should now work.

Finger Print
To get the finger print reader to work just like it did on hardy. we will would be using thinkfinger a tool for configuring fingerpint readers on Linux.However the Thinkfinger in the Ubuntu repositories has some issues with ibex. so we would have to use an updated version. from a 3rd party repository.

Open Synaptic System/Administration/Synaptic
go to settings/Repositories and choose the Third-Pary Software tab Click add (not add CD-ROM) and add the following
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jon-oberheide/ubuntu intrepid main
when you are done click add source and close the the software sources tab.
now click the reload button on synaptic. once its done refreshing . search for the following thinkfinger-tools and libpam-thinkfinger right click install and apply and once its done. the first part is installed

secondly we are going to configure how to use the finger print reader for authentication. to do this we would have to edit some configuration file on the system

time to do some commands .. dont worry its nothing too hard

first we fire terminal

Application/Accessories/Terminal

then copy and paste this in it and hit enter

gksu gedit /etc/pam.d/common-auth

then add the following lines

auth sufficient pam_thinkfinger.so
auth required pam_unix.so try_first_pass nullok_secure

just after # pam-auth-update to manage selection of other modules. See
# pam-auth-update(8) for details. here is how mine looks like

#
# /etc/pam.d/common-auth – authentication settings common to all services
#
# This file is included from other service-specific PAM config files,
# and should contain a list of the authentication modules that define
# the central authentication scheme for use on the system
# (e.g., /etc/shadow, LDAP, Kerberos, etc.). The default is to use the
# traditional Unix authentication mechanisms.
#
# As of pam 1.0.1-5, this file is managed by pam-auth-update by default.
# To take advantage of this, it is recommended that you configure any
# local modules either before or after the default block, and use
# pam-auth-update to manage selection of other modules. See
# pam-auth-update(8) for details.

auth sufficient pam_thinkfinger.so
auth required pam_unix.so try_first_pass nullok_secure

# here are the per-package modules (the “Primary” block)
auth [success=1 default=ignore] pam_unix.so nullok_secure
# here’s the fallback if no module succeeds
#auth requisite pam_deny.so
# prime the stack with a positive return value if there isn’t one already;
# this avoids us returning an error just because nothing sets a success code
# since the modules above will each just jump around
#auth required pam_permit.so
# and here are more per-package modules (the “Additional” block)
# end of pam-auth-update config

Edit

There is an easier way to of getting this done.

just copy and paste this in terminal and press enter

sudo '/usr/lib/pam-thinkfinger/pam-thinkfinger-enable'

Once that is done reboot your computer

Once you are logged in back Open Terminal again and store your finger print on the computer with this command

tf-tool --acquire

swap your finger of choice 3 times

to test run this

tf-tool --verify

then you are done. from now on you can use your finger print for
a) GDM session login
b) Screensaver unlock
c) Sudo and gksudo prompts
d) PolicyKit authorization

Webcam
For some reasons the webcam driver that ships with ibex does not work with the m1330. so we would have to download and compile the one that works for it. again involves the commandline .. but again nothing serious.

we download the latest driver from here
http://linuxtv.org/hg/~pinchartl/uvcvideo/

you can download either the bz2 achieve or the gz i downloaded the gz
once down loaded right click driver and choose extract here. which would extract it the driver folder. now we need to enter into that folder from the commandline. to make this easy rename the extracted folder as just uvcvideo
then place it in your desktop then run this command

cd $HOME/Desktop/uvcvideo
your command line prompt should now look like this
:~/Desktop/uvcvideo$
now just copy paste and run the following commands one after the last one is done

then

make

than finally

sudo make install
running make would sure take a while. but once done make install wont be that long

This step is no-longer needed. All you have to do is install the latest update for your system and webcam would work fine.
sudo apt-get install build-essential cheese libjasper-runtime libjasper1
. once everything is done reboot and start cheese. Appications/Graphic/Cheese.

for those who would like to use their web cam with yahoo the you can use kopete Applications/Internet/Kopete.

In case your is a fresh Ubuntu and you want to install the necessary codecs (mp3,dvds,wma etc)

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y ubuntu-restricted-extras non-free-codecs w32codecs totem-mozilla libdvdcss2

Outstanding issues
Inbuilt mic just found out about it yesterday although i have not found time to look into the problem. am sure there is a walk around they somewhere. i would sure update this post once i resolve the issue.
i hope i was of great help.

Edit
I found a work around for the Internal Mic problem. its still not perfect because your recording would be at a low volume. but its better than nothing

Go to Volume Control and double click on the volume icon in your gnome panel. In Preferences select Digital Input Source. This will enable the Digital Mic 1 option which you should select.

to use with skype: start sype go into Options -> Sound Devices. Select “HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0)” for Sound In, Sound Out, and Ringing.

Go ahead and make a test call to verify that everything is working correctly.
Gotten from this post http://www.wiredrevolution.com/ubuntu/fix-skype-audio-on-ubuntu-with-dell-xps-m1530m1330
Thanks to sixpigeons for pointing it out to me

NB
One issue i forgot was the eject button on top of the keyboard does not work out of the box with ubuntu. i solved the problem here http://bigbrovar.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/how-to-make-m1330s-eject-button-work-with-ubuntu/

Other issues and bugs with M1330 and their work around can be found here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=989039

Bluetooth
By default its impossibe to receive files via bluetooth on Ibex. i was able to get round that by installing gnome-bluetooth from its in the repository and can be installed from synaptic. For it to work you have to run it from Applications/Accessories/Bluetooth File Sharing Thanbks ro nucco for this piece of information. One more thing i did was to add it to my startup so it starts up with my laptop. just add it to your start up session to do this go to /system/preference/session add and paste Bluetooth File Sharing in name paste gnome-obex-server in command and anything u feel like in description. and the program would start everytime you start your system.