Content on this page is probably outdated and represents my personal knowledge, feelings and understading of things at that time.
So I finally got my first laptop. I decided to get a Dell Studio 1555 (N81639). For now, it work very well. But I had some hiccups with Arch Linux instalation and drivers/settings ( I’ll blog about my take on Gentoo vs. Arch in another post ). So, a quick breakdown how I got things working.
Video
My model came with ATI HD4570 card and I found out that xf86-video-ati performence is piss poor, so I’m now using xf86-video-radeonhd driver, that works preatty decent I must say. I’m planning to test the proprietary catalyst driver soon.
Touchpad
I had slight problems with touchpad, but the anwser lies with synaptics driver ( which needs to be loaded, d0h )
Wireless
Wireless setup was amazingly straightforward. The card identified itself as Broadcom BCM4322 therefore I installed the broadcom-wl drivers from AUR and loaded the correct modules. More info on Arch Wiki cripticly named Broadcom_BCM4312
Sound
intel_snd_hda is quite well supported in linux kernel, I’m using an ALSA + PulseAudio setup.
Webcam
Webcam is supported by linux uvcvideo driver, so load the module and rock and roll. (Arch users, be sure to set the correct permissions - 666 - on /dev/video0 )
CPU
cpu frequency scaling works thru acpi-cpufreq and cpufrequtils
Bluetooth
Bluetooth works out of the box with the bluetooth and btusb kernel modules and bluez (and gnome-bluetooth ) on the userspace.
Misc. stuff
I had to toggle the keyboard backlight with the F6 key, and now it works flawlessly.
I still need to test out other components, but it looks like that this laptop works very well with Linux ( even tho it came with Windows 7 Home Premium ) Updates: - 17.12.2009 19:36 - Added Bluetooth information