Debian on a Dell Latitude D620

From GrinningMonkey

Please see Debian on a Dell Latitude D620 - Notes while this page is being built

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1 This Dell Latitude D620's configuration
2 The hardware
3 Prepping laptop and installing Debian
4 Preparing Kernel and modules
5 Extra useful scripts and stuff
6 My final setup

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This Dell Latitude D620's configuration

* T2600 Dual Core 2.16GHz Centrino CPU, 2MB L2 Cache 667MHz FSB
* 2.0GB, DDR2-667 SDRAM, 2 DIMMS
* 100GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 7200RPM SATA
* 14.1 inch Wide Screen WXGA+ LCD Panel (the 1440x900 one)
* Normal keyboard, non-fingerprint-reader touchpad
* 24X CD-RW/DVD w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD
* 256MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M
* Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini Card
* 9-Cell battery and 90W AC adapter

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The hardware

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PROCESSOR

Works great right out of the box. You will need to install or compile an SMP kernel to use both processors, and you probably want CPU frequency scaling.

SMP kernel
ondemand frequency scaling

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MEMORY

This, too works right out of the box. However, to get the system to recognize all the RAM, you need to compile with highmen support.

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HDD

This, too, works out of the box. However, when you install Debian you will need to use a modern version that recognizes SATA hard disk drives.

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DISPLAY

Works right out of the box. Screen brightness controls work properly. I do not know how to adjust the Ambient Light Sensor's thresholds in linux, but the ambient light system does work.

I am using the nVidia binary drivers since they support DRI and the included nv Xorg driver does not (although the nVidia driver has some issues with suspending and AFAIK the Xorg one works well regardless). Nonetheless I have a working suspend/resume solution. See below.

I have not yet tried using the second display but I anticipate no problems. There are plenty of instructions for using TwinView, what nVidia calls its multi-head (either cloned or true multi-head) display mechanism.

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KEYBOARD

Works right out of the box, no surprises, no tweaks.

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MOUSE / TOUCHPAD

Works right out of the box. The TrackPoint and the Touchpad are detected separately.

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TrackPoint

This thing can be annoying. I have used three or four IBM Thinkpads in my years of laptop experience, and they all have excellent nipples. I love the nipple, primarily because I find it very easy to use and I don't have to move my hands from the keyboard to do mousing (I'm a high-speed user, I guess). This Dell TrackPoint is not as good as IBM ones.

It will drift wildly without warning (runs off to one corner or another). It takes a fairly long time to recalibrate. IBM's, when it does drift, drifts a little bit and autocorrects quickly (less than 2 seconds). This one can take a lot longer.
It locks up the touchpad when it does so (this can be avoided by disabling the mouse, but beware that X doesn't "autodetect" it for you).
It usually displays its quirks when the laptop is first turned on; it tends to stabilize after the machine's warmed up -- but not always.
It sometimes gets into a place where it will only move in one or two directions. Leaving it alone usually causes it to eventually recalibrate, but not always.
There have been one or two times where it's gone completely mad. It won't settle down. It does nothing, then shoots off into a corner for awhile. Then it does nothing, then it shoots off again.

In the end, I have completely disabled the TrackPoint. I did this by disassembling the keyboard and placing a small piece of paper between the electrical contacts of the trackpoint and the laptop. See the Debian on a Dell Latitude D620 - Notes page for more details, including a link to Dell's disassembly instructions.

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Touchpad

I have a configuration which I find works quite nicely. I will shortly include my xorg.conf file, but head overe to Debian on a Dell Latitude D620 - Notes for now to see my synclient -l output.

The only quirk left is that, although I can do nice, quick and intuitive double- and triple- taps, it takes up to a quarter-second (as per my configuration) before they're recognized as such. So you do a fast double-tap on top of a word, for example, and wait a couple hundred milliseconds before that word gets highlighted. That's not much of an inconvenience, and I can easily live with it.

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CDROM

Works right out of the box, although you will have to do some tweaking:

to get the Debian installer to recognize it so you can complete your install
to get your normal kernel to regognize it so you can boot normally

It all boils down to the fact that libata.atapi_enabled is set to 0 (disabled) by default. Unfortunately, passing this as a kernel boot option doesn't enable it, but I have found an easy way to get it to work in both situations above -- details to come soon, check the Debian on a Dell Latitude D620 - Notes page in the meantime.

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VIDEO

Works right out of the box in text mode and with the Xorg nv driver. If you want to DRI / acceleration, you need to use the nVidia binary driver. This compiles nicely, but you will have to tweak the install:

It puts its files in /usr/X11R6/lib instead of usr/lib/xorg/modules where they should go. You'll have to move them.

Also, a couple of odd notes:

It doesn't use AGP. It uses PCI Express, which is faster than AGP
The BIOS reports that the video has 64MB of RAM, but X and the nVidia utility nvidia-settings report the correct 256MB. So does Windoz, if you care.

It causes grief with suspend and resume. See my notes under Power Management.

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WIRELESS

Doesn't work right out of the box. You will need to get and compile the ieee80211 and ipw3945 drivers and follow their instructions to install them. Watch out for the ieee80211 installer as it will whack your old ieee80211 files from your kernel tree. This means that you will not be able to compile new kernels! You have to do make patch_kernel from the ieee80211 directory to put its newer files into your kernel tree, so that you can later recompile your kernel if you wish.

Aside from that, the only issue I noticed is that if I try to associate with my Access Point using the restricted setting, it will not associate.

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POWER MANAGEMENT

This is by far what I spent the most time on in setting up this laptop. I tried many kernel / swsuspend / suspend2 / nVidia version configurations in trying to get Suspend-to-DISK working with nVidia's binary driver. I can use Suspend-to-RAM just fine, but it does have a couple of issues:

You need to compile and use the VESA framebuffer console for your kernel. Otherwise, after doing a Suspend-to-RAM, you will not be able to see your text virtual consoles (full notes on how to do this will be here shortly)
I have spotted a very weird issue where:
- IF you suspend-to-RAM
- and THEN try to scroll through text in gnome-terminal, the scrolling will be dog-ass slow. Very laggy.
- but ONLY IF the second processor, CPU1, is handling the load while scrolling (gkrellm allowed me to notice this very odd corellation)
- no other processes, such as glxgears -printfps or scrolling through text in xterm show any slowness whether or not they are running on CPU0 or CPU1
- The slowness goes away if you stop and restart X, but you have to rmmod nvidia; modprobe nvidia in between.