Dell Vostro 1520, Ubuntu 9.10/Fedora 11, Wireless & Promethean
I’ve been trying to get a working build of Linux for our new Dell Vostro 1520 laptops, and have hit on three problems (which I’ve now, I think, resolved)
1. Frequent keyboard/mouse lockups under Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)
2. ActivStudio locks up under Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) – no mouse clicks accepted
3. No wireless support under Ubuntu 9.10 or Fedora 11
I started with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) as this is an officially supported release by Promethean.
Hit a problem where I’d boot up and the keyboard and/or trackpad were unresponsive. Normally just the trackpad.
I managed to work around that – it’s well documented in various fora – by adding irqpoll to the grub boot options (/boot/grub/menu.lst) for the current kernel. (2.6.29, I think it was, from memory)
Got ActivStudio installed. All seemed great. Until I tried to teach a lesson. The board was very sluggish, stubborn to respond to writing, but only occasionally. I put it down to it being an old board. But then I found I could write on the board, but not click on any of the icons, or even close windows, etc. All very odd. Couldn’t find an obvious fix.
So, I tried to update to kernel 2.6.3x via several routes – first, just downloading a deb and installing on Ubuntu 9.04. No wireless support, and the promethean module wouldn’t compile either.
Ok, tried 9.10 beta, with 2.6.31 kernel. No wireless. Grr. Tried Fedora 11, still no wireless. I can’t say I was surprised, as they’re all based on the same kernel, and the change of behaviour is down to a rewrite of the wireless code in 2.6.3x, and NetworkManager, apparently.
So a bit of digging… And it looks to be a Dell specific bug – the wireless kill switch (rfkill) is reporting an incorrect status to NetworkManager, which assumes that therefore the wireless is disabled.
Well, that lead me to a Dell Firmware update for the Vostro 1520, to A03 – bugs fixed? “Fixed incorrect WiFi kill switch status”. Sounds promising. Oh, but you have to run the update from Windows… grr. So, I re-imaged my machine from our standard Windows build, which, fortunately, only takes 6-7 minutes on a gigabit connection. Installed firmware update.
Re-installed Ubuntu 9.10 beta.
Got Wireless! 
Went to Promethean, added the Ubuntu 9.04 deb repository to /etc/apt/sources.list
Installed activdriver, activtools, activinspire, activresources-core-en. Sat back. Rebooted. And then started using my whiteboard.
All seems good so far in iwb on Linux land, with a few tweaks along the way to deal with my hardware oddities.
Ayman, 
Bengan, and 3 others are discussing. 
Michael Groves 11:58 am on October 28, 2009 Permalink |
I also have been having problems installing Ubuntu 9.10 release candidate on my new 1520. Here is what I learned; First of all, 64bit had a number of kernel issues. So I finally installed the 32 bit version. Everything went well with that until, after updating and rebooting, no wireless. So I updated the bios, using a hacked up windows Live CD (don’t ask). Got it to A04… still no wireless. Ended up removing the broadcom drivers and reinstalling them… then wireless come back up. I have to think it was a driver issue, or a bios issue related to the driver. I then tackled the keyboard/mouse locking issue, adding the following to the end of the kernel parameters line in /etc/default/grub.cfg;
i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop
then ran update-grub (9.10 uses grub 2.x).
All is well after that.
Thanks for the post.
Mike
Rajeesh 3:29 am on November 7, 2009 Permalink |
You can try to add “i8042.reset=1″ in the kernel boot parameters to fix the keyboard/touchpad lockup problem.
Adrian 10:54 pm on November 9, 2009 Permalink |
Michael – you must have a different wireless card from me, mine is the Intel based chipset, which is probably why we have different experiences.
Rajeesh – the i8042.reset=1 does work for kernel 2.6.29. No need for it in 2.6.3x as far as I can see.
Vipul 2:10 pm on November 11, 2009 Permalink |
I got a Vostro 1520 couple of days back and had the same issue with wireless.
Updated the bios to A04 (got from Dell website), reinstalled Fedora 11, installed the broadcom-wl and kmod-wl RPMs (as per instructions given in http://www.cenolan.com/2009/06/installing-broadcom-wireless-sta-driver-in-fedora-11/ ) and reboot.
Got the wireless up.
Bengan 5:37 am on December 14, 2009 Permalink |
One weird thing is that I have been running opensuse since June on this laptop with no problem until yesterday when it suddenly stopped working. I think I did an upgrade (standard opensuse one) for a week ago but didn’t reboot the thing. When my wife used the computer it suddenly broke. I’ll be doing the BIOS upgrade today but I have no windows on the machine. Have to install that first.
Ayman 4:23 pm on April 22, 2010 Permalink |
Can you please tell me if you faced issues related to the Headphones Recording? it is not working in my end. Please adivce
Adrian 6:20 pm on August 13, 2010 Permalink |
I’m sorry that I didn’t reply to this earlier – for some reason I didn’t get notified of this comment.
Headphone recording has worked fine for me under Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.xx.