Dell E4300 - XP and Xubuntu Sort-of Review

I received my long-awaited Dell E4300 laptop yesterday.  It’s designed to be portable, with a 13.3″ display (those .3″ really make the difference) and very light weight (not much more than an EEE-PC).  Fortunately it has quite a bit more horsepower than the EEE-PC, due to its Intel 2.4GHz processor, 2G RAM, and lack of Vista.

Specs:

• Intel P9400 dual core 2.4GHz processor
• 2G 1000MHz RAM
• Bluetooth
• 13.3″ display
• very light
• Fujitsu 150G SATA HD
• CD/DVD
• SD/MMC and Smart Card readers
• 1394 connectivity
• touchpad w/many buttons and nipple controller on keyboard
• 1G ethernet, Broadcomm wireless card
• IDT audio
• Vista upgrade to XP
• bluetooth laptop mouse

Unlike my coworker’s almost identical unit, this one came out of the box complete, didn’t require any hardware to be installed, and there were no `extra screws’ left over.  It fired right up, did the whole XP Setup Dance, and went about its business.

This is a decently fast little laptop.  I was favorably impressed while loading additional software and doing my customizations.

Here’s one dislike, keeping in mind that it’s a personal thing: the (*#@ing display is too damn small.  My desktop monitors are at least 19″ and my original laptop is 15.4″.  I suppose this would be filed under Bitching in the Wind, as the 13.3″ display was a compromise to keep the unit portable.  I’m sure it’s fine if you like this sort of thing and that it will work well.  The size should not be a surprise anyway, as I ordered it.

It came with a bluetooth smaller mouse (batteries included!), a pouch, and a small case.  A coworker mused that the pouch was nice, but I said I wanted handles.  He said it if had handles, it would be a case.  Oh.  The zipper on the case came immediately off the track when I went to zip it up.  It’s not like it was overstuffed or anything.  The zipper is just cheap.

How old do I have to be before I can say `they don’t make them like they used to’?

The 4300 performed flawlessly as I worked with it further, although it seemed to feel kind of inadequate sitting next to a Dell D531 and kept running its processors at full bore to compensate.

The absolute weirdest thing about this laptop is that it has one USB port.  One.   It also has an E-SATA port.  Given my choice, I would opt for two USB ports, but I wasn’t given my choice, was I?  It has the normal audio in and out, card slots, an ethernet jack, and an SVGA connector.  There’s an expander connection on the bottom.

The laptop also has a metric boatload of security and storage features, all of which I turned off.  It would have been interesting to do a performance analysis before and after but I didn’t think of it til after.  Oh well.   One of the circumstances leading to my decision to remove was that the feature that saves profiles (a very good idea, handling many more features than network) doesn’t work with wireless yet.

Yes, folks, Dell released a laptop with software that doesn’t control the wireless.  It directs you to the Dell support site, which basically says that the update to fix this is expected to be available at the end of the year.  (Expected)

So I blew that stuff out, along with all the crap that Dell puts on the desktop.  I highly recommend RevoUninstaller.  It’s among the first things I run on a new machine (and it’s a sad thing that I have to).

When I got the bugger home, I couldn’t stand to look at XP any longer, so I booted to an Ubuntu 8.04 live disk to check compatibility.  As a side note, I joined the Dell community and posted a message asking if anybody had a 4300 w/ Ubuntu or was planning to.  As of two weeks ago, there was nary an answer (but hundreds of views).   Ubuntu did not like the display so I had to boot into safe video mode, at which point it came up beautifully.  It found most if not all of the hardware (more than XP, oddly) but although it identified the wireless card (Broadcom- yikes!), it looked as if I’d have to do the old ndiswrapper trick to make it work.

As everything looked fine, I told Ubuntu to install.  I decided to repartition manually because I wanted something different, and Gparted flatly refused to do the repartitioning.  This didn’t exactly come as a surprise, as I just spent two days fighting with Gparted to convince it to repartition a different laptop on the bench.  I eventually had to wipe the drive on the bench (with its fresh XP install) and do it all over again.  Since I refused to mangle the existing partition and since it probably wasn’t because of that anyway, I gave up for the evening on getting Ubuntu installed.

Prior experience with Gparted tells me that I need to try the latest version, as well as a few older ones before it will work.  Of course I could just jettison the XP partition anyway, but I have to make certain I have a working computer with any OS.

Back at work, I booted to the latest Gparted and it worked!  I feel excited because I’ve had so little success lately (you get it any way you can).  The partitioning worked out fairly weirdly, with partitions for Windows, utility, swap, linux, and home.  While installing Ubuntu, it detected the Windows accounts and asked if I wanted to import them (never saw that before).  Ironically it only offered to import settings from Internet Explorer, making Ubuntu Microsoft-centric.  When have you ever heard that before?

My favorite progress message has to be `Removing conflicting operating system files.’

Within twenty minutes or so, Ubuntu had installed itself and asked me to reboot.  It correctly identified Windows and allowed me the choice of which OS to boot into, with Ubuntu as the default.  And good thing too, as that’s what I wanted.

It boots in a flash, right into that hideous brown Gnome desktop, with that hideous birdlike thing on the wallpaper.  Ah, I always know I’m home when I see that.  And it’s always the first thing I change.   Unfortunately there are bigger cats to mow down at this point - the system didn’t find the ethernet card.  Lovely.

A bit of Googling later, I wound up at Intel (you’re kidding!), which had the driver and the instructions.   This was a fortuitous stop, as once I got the driver installed, the laptop was already connected to the network.  Yay (again).

Here is where being a little computer savvy (or stupidly fearless) helped me.  I was reading all sorts of things about which linux kernel required which driver, which drivers looked alike but weren’t, building and inserting modules into the kernel, and confirming that Intel has been smoking some serious weed when they number and name their network adapters.  Yes, it’s in the Pro 1000 adapter family but the specific number is 82567LM - intuitive, no?  Just make sure you need the e1000e instead of the e1000 triple Q, or you’ll hose the network card, the laptop, and possibly the entire internet.

The directions were flawless and took different linux distributions into account.  In my case, it was a matter of `sudo make install’ and by the time I typed `ifconfig’ the laptop had gone out and gotten itself an IP address (DHCP).   Again, I don’t know much about kernels (the things that get caught in your teeth when you eat popcorn) or modules (the things they take out of you during surgery) but I went ahead and read the instructions, and here I am with a working network card.  It’s not all that daunting.

The real fun (what, you mean we’re not having fun yet?) will be the wireless.  This is documented many places on the web already, so I won’t bother here unless there’s a new twist added.  Since it’s a Broadcom, I expect the ndiswrapper with the Windows driver will do the trick.

More as it comes in…

Yes, the Broadcom Fix<tm> got the wireless networking working.  But not until I downloaded two hundred fifty seven updates.  Then it suddenly popped into being, in an almost quantum incident.  After clicking on the networking icon, I saw it had recognized my wireless and I got it connected in seconds (don’t forget to use WPA or better and secure things the best you can).  The Bluetooth indicator came up without any coaxing but I don’t plan on using it anytime soon.  Hopefully it will work with my Treo on the linux side but I’m not doing any extensive breath-holding.

Since I started with an Ubuntu disk, I had to install XFCE, as that’s my preferred desktop.  I have no idea where this menu up top thing got started but I wasted no time in customizing things to my liking.

This is one snappy little laptop.  The keyboard makes a satisfying click when you type.  The screen is nice.  It will go anywhere with me (as soon as I get the usb modem installed and a usb hub… stupid).  If I had known it only had one usb port, I would’ve gotten the internal cellular modem.

I’ll be updating this as I use it more.  Thus far, size aside, it’s a positive purchase that will allow me to monitor and do network maintenance on the road.  The right tool for the right job.