I purchased a refurbished Dell Latitude CPxH500 in 2001 after researching laptops which would fully support Linux. I am a Perl programmer and needed a good portable machine which could also serve as my desktop at home and which could dual- boot with both Windows and Linux. I primarily use Linux. I purchased a refurb to save $300 and because it came with a full 3 year warrentee, including on-site part swapping the 1st year (after MY purchase). With a refurb, I also know the memory and boards are good and burned in and no wires were left loose :) I ordered the machine off of Dell's online "outlet mall" (http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfh/default.htm), and found a machine (here) to my liking (128 meg memory, 8 meg video, 12 gig hard drive, 14.1" TFT screen 1024x768), where everything was known to be supported by Linux). One of the unique features of this machine is it has BOTH a "trackpoint" AND a touchpad mouse built right onto the front! The machine arrived 5 days after I ordered it online, and looked and even smelled like brand new! I powered it up and Windows-98 came right up. I had to give it my name and tell it that I did NOT want to register it now, it then left me alone and put me into good ol' Windoze 98. I immediately ran defrag to shove everything down to the bottom of the disk (so I could shrink the Windows partition to make room for my Linux repartition), and checked to see exactly what video and audio devices I had and made notes.

Linux installation:

Have a blank floppy handy (to make a backup "boot floppy")!

I then placed my Mandrake 7.2 Linux CD into the CD bay and rebooted. Mandrake's graphical installer came right up. The first order of business is to make Linux partitions. The machine came with an unidentified partition (about 130 meg). Don't touch this -- it is your "Suspend-To-Disk" partition, and your memory is saved here on suspend regardless of which os is booted up. If you are soon planning to upgrade memory, leave enough contiguous room after this partition to later expand it to the new memory size. A DOS utility is required to redo / change size of this partition. The other partition was one huge Windows partition taking up everything else. (Make SURE you have run Windows DEFRAGGER BEFORE repartitioning!!!) You can then carefully follow the prompts to shrink the Windows partition, create one or more Linux partitions, and a Linux Swap. After partitioning and formatting were done, I choose a custom "developer's" install, and picked and choose my packages. Installation went pretty much without a hitch, except the screen freaked out during the video test (the last thing in the install), but rebooting solved this. After rebooting, everything worked fine except Suspend/Resume. APM (Power management) seemed to work -- with software (I use "asapm"), I could tell what my power source was and approx. how much battery life I had.

Also, follow the installer's advice and let it make a "boot floppy" (or two) for you and, after your install has successfully booted up, TEST it!!!! Either I mislabeled mine OR it DIDN'T work because I hacked on some LILO/Kernel stuff &, couldn't reboot and had to reinstall!

Notes about XFree86 and Suspend / Resume:

Mandrake setup (and DrakeConf - after initial installation) will give you the option of using XFree86 v. 3.3.6 or 4.0.1. with the warning that 4.0.1 does not include 3D support. Unless your are a very serious gamer, choose 4.0.1! Choose the default monitor that it suggests - (1024x768). It then offers to make X the default on bootup, but tell it NO! It will work, and you can always make it so later by rerunning DrakeConfig, but you had better have X up and working stable before you do, so that if X crashes, you can fall back to a text console and fix it!

I initially chose 4.0.1, but suspend wouldn't work -- machine would resume with a black screen and would not respond to anything short of removing all power, including pulling out the battery to get it to restart -- ouch! This would also happen after 30 minutes of inactivity. Screen would go black after 10 minutes, but could be restarted by pressing a key or moving the mouse, but after 30 minutes, it litterally would go into a coma. I tried switching back to 3.3.6 and editing /etc/sysconfig/apmd and setting (uncommenting) "CHANGEVT=Y". This FIXED all my suspend problems, but now there was an annoying vertical speckled line about 1 inch left of the right edge of the screen. I tried xvidtune, changing modelines, even going back to 4.0.1 to get the modeline IT used, all to no avail. I finally found two rpms on DELL's site (http://support.dell.com/us/en/filelib/). Both were for Red Had Linux 7.0, one pertained to suspend/resume, and the other was a video driver for my ATI enRAGEd Mobility M1 graphics card. The first (apm7_0.rpm) contained no files, and when installed, simply set a parameter (PCMCIARESTART="yes") in apmd to turn off the PCMCIA card controller on suspend. The other (atim170.rpm) was nothing more than an XF86Config-4 file, which goes in /etc/X11/. Be sure to BACK UP your WORKING XF86Config-4 file FIRST!!!!!!!!!!

After installing the 2 DELL RED HAT Linux packages, X would not come up due to an error about the font server. Editing the new XF86Config-4 file and setting the font server port back to "unix/:-1" and re-adding the FontPath line just above it (in the working XF86Config-4 file) restored X to it's form, except it was now in 16bpp color :( Editing XF86Config-4 AGAIN, I reset my "DefaultColorDepth" option back to 24 (from 16), and all was normal again. Suspend, however, STILL didnt work in X! Just on a lark, I decided to reedit the apmd config file again and REcomment out the "CHANGEVT=7" line and tried again -- it WORKED!!!!! Using "apm --suspend" and "apm --standby" both worked fine, Pressing <Fn-<F1(Suspend)>> also worked fine, BUT closing and reopening the lid DIDN'T!!!!!! The screen, in this case would start up (on but blank), but then 3 seconds later, go right back off and no mouse or keypress would reawaken it EXCEPT <Ctrl-Alt-Backspace> or <Ctrl-Alt-F#> to switch back to a TEXT console! Then, just by accident, I discovered that by pressing <Fn-<F5(Reverse-Video)>> would reawaken the screen with an error message about reverse-video NOT being available in graphics mode and following it's instruction to press <Esc> restores my X screen nicely -- Problem "Solved"!!!!!!!! <Fn-<d>> followed by another key will also reawaken your screen. By the way, <Fn-<d>> can also be used to blank/unblank your screen at will.

I have had someone report that Suspend/Resume works without quirks with XFree86 v. 4.0.2 and 4.0.3.

Other Notes:

I did try an external monitor briefly today (an HP "Ergo" 1600) 21 incher. I plugged it into the back of the machine (already on), and pressed <Fn-<F8>> and it switched to it without a hitch, pressing the same key-combo again switched me back. It takes about a full second each way. I did not have time to fiddle around to see if I could get the monitor to work at higher resolutions, etc. since it is not mine.

I also got the "Windows" start and menu keys to work in KDE by first creating a ".Xmodmap" file in my home directory containing the following 2 lines:

• keycode 115 = F13
• keycode 117 = F15

then going into KDE's "Control panel" under key-bindings, and changing the appropriate popup menu actions to activate on key "F15" and "F17".

I recently installed a DELL internal CD-RW drive and got it up and workiing fine using "xcdroast" I did, however, have to add "hdc=ide-scsi" to my boot options in "/etc/lilo.conf" and the following 2 lines to my "/etc/modules.conf" file:

	options ide-cd ignore=hdc   # tell the ide-cd module to ignore hdc
	alias scd0 sr_mod           # load sr_mod upon access of scd0

For additional info, refer to the CD-ROM howtos.

I also recently setup my own home wireless network, using my Linux laptop, my wife's Windows-XP laptop, and my daughter's Windows-95 laptop. I set up an "Ad-Hoc" network using "Orinoco Silver" pcmcia cards. I set up "Samba" to share my printer. Note, I did not need to purchase a base-station or any other hardware (other than the pcmcia wireless cards)!

Quirks:

Every laptop seems to have quirks with Linux, and this one is no exception, but it appears to only have two very trivial ones related to Linux:

1) (Trivial): Resume after supend in X (only when closing and reopening the lid) requires two extra keypresses to awaken the screen as I mentioned above.

2) (Trivial): The volume and mute keys have no effect, but sound volume is adjustable with software. Dell sais they will only work with Windows, and when asked for the specs, I was told that Dell had not even released them to their own technical support people! You would think this would be hardware or bios controlled, but apparently not.

UPDATE! The VOLUME AND MUTE KEYS NOW WORK!, using the "i8k" module from (http://www.diefer.de/micha_henze/i8kfangui.html)! In Mandrake 9.0, this module is included, simply add "i8k" to your "/etc/modules" file. To make it work, download "aumix" (http://jpj.net/~trevor/aumix.html), build and install it, then download my script (setmixer) which translates the key-presses into actual volume adjustments via "aumix"! Your volume keys now increment and decrement the volume by 10%, and the Mute toggle actually toggles between mute and the previous volume! :) You can also use the i8k stuff to control your fan too. I have only tried this once with "i8kmon" (included), and it seems to work fine. There is also a Windows version of i8k too (good for fan control)

BTW: I liked this laptop so much that I purchased a 2nd one (used) recently for <$700 for my better half at Dallas Laptops. She has been assimulated by the evil M$-empire and insists on running Windows-XP, which works great (if you like Windows), even though DELL's XP-rediness site said the "abUser experience" would be less than ideal (they want to sell new hardware ;). One thing interesting, though is that the volume keys do NOT work with Win-XP, but they DO work w/Linux! :)

3) (Trivial): (Windows & Linux) Screen brightness and contrast keys have very high control-display ratios -- the range of possible adjustment is VERY SMALL. This seems to be common these days, I miss the days when brightness knobs could be used to turn displays all the way black! You can, however change the brightness levels in the bios settings and have different levels for battery and ac-power. The screen is adjustable to a level pleasing to my eyes indoors.

Update 9/2004: I recent acquired a Dell C-Dock II Docking station which has all the ports on the back except for audio-in and TV-out. It also has it's own NIC, which seems to work fine with the high-speed broadband I recently signed up for! :) The only advantage I can see with this docking station (which was free to me) is that you don't have to unhook all your wires (except your modem, mike, and TV-out) when you hit the road. You also get separate PS-2 mouse and keyboard ports, though MY PS-2 port went bad and fried 2 mice before I realized it - GRRRRRR¡ On top of that, it's bad even through the dock too. Thank goodness for USB, which seems to work fine with my IBM Scrollpoint USB mouse, keyboard, and my digital camera!

I also got the TV-out to work using atitvout! I use the following code in a shellscript with mplayer to play DVDs:

	atitvout -f t
	mplayer -vo vesa -fs dvd://$1
	atitvout -f l

I have not gotten it to work with X.

Annoyances / whines

One slighly annoying (I think) "feature" of this box is that you can NOT have both the CD-ROM & the floppy drive in at the same time -- some notebooks, such as my old CTX "Easybook", will let you remove the battery and use the floppy instead -- I mostly use my system as a desktop replacement anyway. If you use the CD-ROM, you must connect the floppy drive up to the parallel port with the cable (included), (after finding the darned thing!) and this works fine with Linux, in fact, it is hot-switchable with your printer. Just unplug your printer and plug it in and it works! When done, just unplug and plug your printer back in.

There is also no dust-flap door(s) hanging over the PCMCIA bays, so they are just wide open if you do not have cards in them :( !

(dumb luck) The speaker jack (on my unit) appears to have a slight short, requiring wiggling the speaker and headset plug around a bit. (There's always something -- annoying to live with but too much trouble to get fixed - grrrrrrrrrr!) :-|=| I still wouldn't shy away from "refurbs", my experience has shown that this same kind of $%?# seems to be the case just as often with "BRAND NEW" stuff these days.

The fan (sounds like a miniture hairdryer) is noticable when it comes on, if needed - and usually stays on until you reboot. It does seem to do a reasonable job of cooling the system, and you usually forget about it.

NOTE: Upgrading my bios from A08 to A12 fixed my fan problems -- fan now only rarely comes on and usually goes off soon after. A12 was released for this purpose. To upgrade, download the .exe from DELL's site, reboot to Windows, get a blank floppy handy, run the EXE, follow the instructions to build the floppy, then reboot to it and follow the instructions. My upgrade went without a hitch.

Specs:

Overall:

Very good notebook for Linux -- I now have everything working (sound, video, modem, suspend, network, trackpoint, touchpad, apm, battery monitoring, and of course Linux and all my software. I would definately recommend this laptop for serious Linux users like me on a budget! :-) Dell sells these notebooks with Linux preinstalled, but for much higher price and without Windows, which I do occasionally need! It is also Red-Hat, and I prefer to avoid Red-Hat, since I am forever seeing newsgroups filled with difficulties getting Red-Hat stuff to work in general -- they try to set up too many things in non-standard ways. I therefore reccommend getting the standard Windows setup and installing your favorite flavor of Linux yourself.

Here's my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file (XFree86 v. 4.0.1). Email me & I'll send you my apmd script or any other configuration files, if you have trouble. Your milage may vary ;)

Linux Laptops Home

Jim Turner

mail to: turnerjw784 -At- yahoo d0t com