Debian Linux on the Dell Latitude D630

Introduction

I acqured one of these machines in June 2008. D630s are not all identical to each other: they have several options you cam choose betwen when you buy one. Mine has the 1440x900 display, the intel graphics card (GM965/GL960) and Intel 3495 wireless option. I'll add notes about any weirdnesses I find. But isn't it amazing how much stuff just works these days?

Distribution

I tried installing Debian Stable (etch) but the version of Xorg was not new enough to play well with the graphics card. So I went back to the start and installed testing (Lenny) from scratch. The install is straightforward: I put in the netinst CD, pressed f12 on power-up, chose the CD/DVD to boot from and followed the instructions. You don't seem to have to configure X any more, it just works. I did the install in steps, going for just the base system at first, then adding dselect (cos I'm an old debian git and I prefer it) and using that to add xorg, KDE and a pile of goodies. And having done that, most things seem to just work. Sound works: I played an MP3. 3-D acceleration works: glxgears reports it working and Google Earth (even the new and greedy 4.3) works smoothly. X runs at the full resolution of the LCD panel with no intervention. Bluetooth works: I transferred some files from my phone. Sound works. If you install acpitool you can suspend to both memory ( acpitool -s) and to disk ( acpitool -S), although I have yet to assess the reliability of resuming from these states. I have yet to test the modem --- I'm not sure I can still remember how dial-up networking works.

Function keys and VGA output

One thing that did not initially work is the function keys. To get action from these, you probably need various packages with libsmbios in their names installed. You also need to install a kernel module called dcdbas --- just add the line dcdbas to /etc/modules to have this happen on boot. With this done, Fn-Up and Fn-Down will alter the screen brightness. (Fn-Left and Fn-Right have markings on them that pertain to a different laptop and are not supposed to do anything on this one).

None of this makes Fn-F8 (LCD/CRT) do anything. This was important as I need that external VGA port to work. Fortunately, you can get full control over this from the command line with xrandr. (You need the package x11-xserver-utils to be installed.) For instance:
xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1024x768
xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768
will swich the LCD panel to 1024x768 and enable the VGA port at the same resolution. If you hate to see a screen displaying at the wrong aspect ratio, you can do
xrandr --output LVDS --set PANEL_FITTING full_aspect
to get black sidebars instead of stretching.

CPU speed, battery life etc.

Debian's stock kernel is now at 2.6.26. Debian disabled the old (/proc) interface to ACPI when they introduced the 2.6.25 kernel, so a lot of user-space tools for dealing with your battery and CPU became broken. In KDE, you therefore needed to use KPowersave and not KLaptop (even though the latter is better-integrated into the control centre). However, this change annoyed enough users that /proc/acpi was re-enabled when the kernel was upgraded to 2.6.26.

I had a few problems with CPU frequency which I think may have been due to having cpufreqd installed --- I have now un-installed this. You do want cpufrequtils installed so that you can use cpufreq-info to check on the frequencies available. You should have a range between 800MHz and 2.201GHz.

WiFi

This works as long as you have installed the package firmware-iwlwifi, which is in non-free. I have had some problems with it, particularly in places where there are a lot of other users using the same network. The problems were not repeatable enough for me to be able to track down their source, but they did not seem to be affecting Windows or MacOSX machines using the same network. On the other hand, I have encountered wireless networks with which I had no trouble, but Windows users found inaccessible. YMMV!

Compiz

I installed compiz and compiz-kde, but compiz does not work immediately -- it reports the graphics card as blacklisted. If you do export SKIP_CHECKS=yes and try to start compiz it works. Presumably it interferes with some other function (probably video playback) or the card would not be blacklisted, but I have yet to test this. Compiz still is not integrated well into KDE's control centre, but apart from that all of the toys seem to work. You need to run ccsm by hand to configure them.