Arch Linux on the M1330
Sat, August 11th 2007 at 03:24am
Well after using my new M1330 for a week I am pretty pleased. Everything is great, except for the noise coming from the CPU area, but that is for another post. This post is about my initial experiences installing Arch Linux on my new Dell XPS M1330.
Arch Linux?
For the past year or so I have been using Ubuntu nearly exclusively and have been quite happy with everything. Before that I was an pretty happy Slackware user. Ubuntu won me over with the amount of documentation, polished install and interface, and upto date releases.
However with this new laptop Fiesty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) would not install at all, the Alpha version of Gutsy Gibon got further but crashed. That is when Arch Linux was recommenced to me on notebookreview.com and I decided to give it a try.
My first thought when I saw the installer and read some of the documentation was that Arch is like Slackware in philosophy, but with a little more focus on stability and more on keeping things fresh. They let you keep your disto a light or heavy as you like, but they also make you work for it.
Linux on the Dell XPS M1330
The install was actually pretty easy, I just had to select the legacy_ide option while booting so that the installer could see my CDROM Drive. After that everything was pretty straight forward, I just did a base install with the plan of installing other packages later.
After install the first thing I did was update Xorg to version 1.3 and install the latest drivers for the Intel X3100 graphics. After that I just had to play with the xorg.conf file a little to use the correct driver, and get the correct resolution etc. After that X looked really good on the system.
The main feature of Arch linux, and for me is also it’s biggest downfall, is the amount of user customization. After installing the base system and getting X working I realized that nearly none of the other features I needed were installed or configured yet.
For example, I have a little problem with the CPU making a whining noise. It was replaced in linux by a more constant high pitched whine, so I had a pretty good idea that Speedstep was not working yet. So I had to manually install the cpufreq kernel module, and configure it by hand.
Now that is what Arch seems to be all about, but when you have a long list of features you need for a notebook computer it can be very daunting. The prospect of having to install and configure everything from power management to the media buttons was not something I looked forward too.
In all I think the main reason I was able to install Arch over the few other distros I tried was due to the fact that Arch just released a new version. As new releases of other distributions come out I think the install on new hardware like the M1330 will become easy.
For now I am going to continue playing with Linux. Right now I am downloading Slackware 12, and OpenSuse beta. But I think I will be waiting for Ubuntu 7.10 to come out.
Tags: Arch Linux, Dell, Linux, XPS M1330
