Installing Hardy heron on my laptop was quite a breeze. the only thing i had to configure was the finger print reader. but even that went quite well after following an easy guide.
However Ibex was not that easy. Ibex was released some 6 days after i got my dell so it was good timing. but my first experience was very unpleasant. and things that just use to work on hardy without an extra config didn’t work on Ibex.Things like my Finger print reader stopped working even after i followed the guide that worked so well on hardy. Webcam too stopped working. that worked on hardy without me lifting a finger. my inbuilt mic too was affected. in the end i had to downgrade back to hardy and waited for the dust to settle and for the real geeks to figure out all the issues 
. well the good news is that they have. am back to Ibex and must of the issues have been resolved. well not yet out of the box though but here are what i did to fix the issues.
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.
