[Wylug-help] Laptop Suggestions

[John Hodrien]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Smylers wrote:

> John Hodrien writes:

>> I'd be really lazy and suggest another Dell.  ... a Latitude D430 or
>> D630.
>
> The D630 is 2 kg, but the D430 is a strong contender, and at under £850
> (including vat) much cheaper than other manufacturers' alternatives.

Yes, you're quite right, my brain was tripping.

>  This is not a synaptics touchpad, so the nice utilities for
>  configuring those don't work.  So far I haven't been able to disable
>  the bit too sensitive tap-to-click feature or turn this completely
>  off.  Will post here if I find a solution.
>
>  -- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/DellLatitudeD430#touchpad

I'm not sure this is true.

http://www.bortzmeyer.org/dell-latitude-d430-linux.html

Nice page, with dmesg output.  Seems to say synaptics works.

[   17.044000] input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint as /class/input/input4

http://www.felipe-alfaro.org/blog/2005/08/19/alps-glidepoint-under-linux-with-xorg/

Suggests the current synaptics (0.13.5-5 or newer) drivers works with this
hardware.  Seeing as my Fedora 7 box has 0.14.4-8 I figure this'll be on
whatever you install.

> The D430 has Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950.  Any ideas on whether
> that'll work?

I'd assume it would, but couldn't make any guarantees.  Since the first page I
linked to mentions Pipe A and Pipe B (where there's a flat panel attached to
A), I'd be /very/ surprised if you couldn't get what you wanted working.  The
i810 driver man page suggests this shouldn't be a problem to sort out.  It's
even got what I rate as trimmings:

  Option "CheckLid" "boolean"
               On mobile platforms it’s desirable to monitor the lid status and
               switch the outputs accordingly when the lid is opened or closed.
               By default this option is on, but may incur a very minor perfor-
               mance penalty as we need to poll a register on the card to check
               for this activity. It can be turned off using this option.  This
               only  works  with  the  830M, 852GM and 855GM systems.  Default:
               enabled.

Some of the autodetection stuff appears to be BIOS dependent, but I don't
imagine you *require* autodetection.

jh

-- 
"Committee - a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group
  decide that nothing can be done."                   -- Fred Allen