Commentaires sur : Dell Latitude E4300 with Debian

Par : Williams27Rochelle

Williams27Rochelle — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:50:41 +0000

All people deserve wealthy life time and personal loans or college loan would make it better. Just because people's freedom is based on money state.

Par : Louis

Louis — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:31:14 +0000

I just got this laptop and even running xorg 7.5 (with squeeze) I cannot have the video output to be sent to a monitor connected to the laptop.
Do you have any clue on the subject, or could you share your xorg.conf, please?

Thanks you for you answer.
Louis

Par : Martin Žember

Martin Žember — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:11:18 +0000

For bluetooth:
install:
bluez
the firmware: bluez-firmware
bluetooth
maybe:
bluez-utils
bluez-hcidump

Then turn on/off with the Fn key.

hcitool dev
and
hcitool scan
might help.

The kernel was 2.6.29-bpo.2-686-bigmem.

Par : bools

bools — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:00:39 +0000

Hi!
I have the same problem than you with alsa and the jack on docking station. It seems imposible to play sound only on the dock and not on the laptop speaker. Any workaround since this time?

Par : L.

L. — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:11:28 +0000

Here (big Dell customer in france), Dell sent us a test that we were supposed to run (it was just a cpuburn binary for windows). If it failed, they said they would change the Motherboard.

Par : Buxy

Buxy — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:03:35 +0000

@Mugz: What is an « L2″ ?

I wish I could believe you but the promise of a BIOS fix has been made twice already by some Dell representatives and every time there was no new BIOS at the expected release date.

Par : MUGZ

MUGZ — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:38:44 +0000

When the correct BIOS is released, the information will be listed under the « Fixes and Enhancements » section of the BIOS on the support site. This is currently the being deployed by Dell to resolve the issue, not a new motherboard. If they are unable to correct it by using creating a new BIOS, a last resort of creating new motherboards for the systems, but that certainly is not the case at the moment. I’m an L2 for Dell, and that’s the most up to date information they’ve provided about the issue so far. If A06 is currently working for some people, that’s great, but odds are the issue will return. The only 100% effective work around to the issue that is currently known is to disable multi-core support in the BIOS. I wish there was another way, but unfortunately there’s not that we know of thus far. As soon as I receive more information on the resolution to this issue, I will be happy to post it here. I know it is currently a priority for Dell and hopefully it will be resolved through a BIOS update so that everyone can avoid having to have their mbds replaced.

Sorry I don’t have any further information at the moment, but I’ll post back as soon as I do.

Par : Buxy

Buxy — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:30:03 +0000

The BIOS A06 does not fix the issue, the problem is officially known to Dell’s QA team and they have a new motherboard in preparation. I also thought the problem went away after 11 days without freeze but it froze eventually again. It really depends on how you’re using your computer. The only safe work-around is to disable multi-core support but it’s not something that I can accept as a long term solution.

My tech support told me that I was on their list of persons to contact when they received the new batch of fixed motherboards and that I would be able to get a next-day on-site replacement when that is the case. Anyone affected by this bug can certainly request the same. You should not trust people claiming that it can be fixed with a BIOS update unless you can see that information on the Dell drivers page directly.

Par : Inigo

Inigo — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:26:04 +0000

I’ve had the freezing problem since September 2008. I have installed the A06 BIOS the day it was published (around three weeks ago) and I haven’t had it since.

My workaround of choice before A06 was to disable wlan, and only use ethernet. In this configuration, I never had a freeze, either.

For three weeks I’m on wlan again, and I’m happy to say that it seems to be working well.

The only thing to regret in this story is the lack of information coming from Dell, what the A06 BIOS really fixed, and what other reasons could have been causing these freezes

Par : MUGZ

MUGZ — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:22:55 +0000

The freezing is a known issue with the E4300. There’s a work around that resolves the issue, but it will decrease the performance of the system. The issue is currently being worked on to resolve the issue via a BIOS update, but it has not yet been released (A06 is the current version).

The work around is to disable Multi-core support in the BIOS:

Turn on system > Tap F2 at the Dell Screen > Go to Performance > Uncheck the multi-core support box > hit apply > hit escape.

As stated, this will resolve the issue, but the system will likely run noticeably slow.

Par : Albert

Albert — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:13:50 +0000

Hi,

I took the liberty of creating a Linux Launchpad team for the people who own or develop for the Dell Latitude E4200/E4300 laptops, so that we can have more visibility upstream when having to ask for patches or support.

https://launchpad.net/~e4200-e4300

I’ll be sending a couple of messages to ubuntuforums and notebookreview forums to gather the ~15 users I’ve identified so far.

Cheers,

Albert.

Par : Buxy

Buxy — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:06:30 +0000

Another interesting link: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4389570&postcount=406

Par : Jan David

Jan David — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:49:33 +0000

The freezes are not linux-specific, and seem quite common:

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19245498.aspx

Par : Inigo

Inigo — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:34:28 +0000

I've tried A05 for a few days and freezes are still there. But only when wi-fi is active. See this thread...

Par : Diego

Diego — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:22:53 +0000

There’s a new BIOS (ver. a05) in Dell support page for our laptop that claims to solve freezes.
http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?os=BIOSA&osl=FR&catid=-1&impid=-1&servicetag=&SystemID=LAT_E4300&hidos=WLH&hidlang=FR&TabIndex=

Par : Inigo

Inigo — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:17:02 +0000

I have also the E4300, running Ubuntu 8.10 32 bits, with a standard 5400rpm Drive. I’m quite happy overall, but I’m also experiencing random freezes, where both numlock and capslock start blinking.

I’ve tried updating to the latest kernel, 2.6.27-11 which was supposed to fix some wireless-related problems that some people at ubuntu identified as a possible cause of the freezes, to no avail. The freezes are still there.

While looking for traces of the crashes, I noticed something quite interesting, my /var/log/kern.log , message and syslog were all of them over 2 GBytes of size. I emptied them, and the laptop went for two days without a freeze, but a few minutes ago it did it again. I checked again, and now the log files have normal sizes, but no trace of what could have caused the freezes, although some suspicious WPA-related (wifi) activity takes place everytime before the crash…

Well, I’ll keep searching…

Good luck with yours. If at any time Debian proves to be stable I may considering moving back from Ubuntu after… oh, 5 years I think

Par : Buxy

Buxy — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:36:41 +0000

Cyril, the point is to inform and people decide what they want. The point is also to seek inputs from others with the same laptop to try to guess what’s responsible for those freezes. For instance, it has happened many times early after the graphical login… so it was triggered by something in my user session. But I have never been able to find out what precisely. I certainly hope that those freeze will go away sometime soon maybe with a newer kernel. And lucas told he doesn’t have those freeze, so it’s not a generic problem with this model either.

Concerning the wear-leveling, all SSD have that integrated in the hardware and from what I read, it should most certainly last long enough for my needs (3 years, and my laptop is backupped daily anyway).

Joost, here the problem is that that Bluetooth device is not detected at all… nothing in dmesg, nothing interesting after “modprobe btusb” either.

Par : Cyril Chaboisseau

Cyril Chaboisseau — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:52:32 +0000

Well, this review isn’t particularly favorable towards this brand or hardware : no one would like to buy a computer that has regular freezes. So if the point was to warn users against buying this laptop, then you made your point.
Personally I run Debian’s amd64 flavor since October 2004 and beside 2/3 froze that were due to the nVidia proprietary driver, I’ve never had any other trouble ever since (I now run the official Xorg nv driver and will try envy as soon as « sid/unstable » has it).

On top of that, Dell who used to propose Ubuntu beside Windows has almost completely dropped the offer and this specific model is no exception. We know how it is getting very difficult not to have Windows force-feed these days with a branded computer (esp. a laptop).

So, I would definitely *not* recommend this particular model for someone who wish to run Linux on it.

Nevertheless, I hope that you’ll find the reason of these freezes and post the result.

Cheers,

PS : anyway, it looks quite nice and I bet the SSD is much fun to play with (but watch out for the wear-leveling until the file system takes it into consideration).

Par : Joost

Joost — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:32:25 +0000

Hi,

I also had problems with bluetooth with my new laptop. Switching to 2.6.27.7 fixed it for me, as I documented here:

http://damad.be/joost/blog/2008/11/linux-debian-bluetooth.html

Par : Buxy

Buxy — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:35:52 +0000

The CPU is given in the first paragraph: Intel Core 2 Duo SP9400 2.4 Ghz but /proc/cpuinfo gives the same as you:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 23
model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     P9400  @ 2.40GHz
[…]