candidate patches for Dell laptops and netbooks

[Andy Burns]

[Apologies because this reply to an ancient message will inevitably
break threading]

On Wed Oct 21 2009 Matt Domsch wrote:

> Mario Limonciello is a Dell engineer,
> he's been working on making sure Dell's notebooks and
> netbooks work with Ubuntu and therefore very recent kernels.

I have a mini9, I was very pleased that F11 worked out of the box on
it, almos every device recognised, while of course there were plenty
of improvements in F12, there have also been some regressions for this
machine.

===

Most annoying is pm-suspend no longer working out of the box, each
time I reboot, I have to
startup in runlevel3,
log in as root on text console
manually perform a pm-suspend
resume by pressing power button
switch to runlevel5
login to Gnome as non-root user
after that rigmarole, I can suspend merely by shutting the lid and
resume by opening it again, just like F11 managed out of the box

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=542130

Side effect of having to login to the text console first is that the
GUI session doesn't get to own the SD card slot.

====

Occasionally when unplugging the power lead (1 in 25 or less
frequently) I get the gnome notification
     "laptop battery critically low
     the battery is blow the critical level
     this computer is about to shut down"

If my X session is the only logged-on session the machine shuts down
with no chance to save work or cancel the shutdown, my workaround for
this is to leave another user logged onto a text console, that way the
system policy requests root authentication to shut it down and I can
cancel it, seems that the battery level can momentarily read as 0%
during unplugging, and this panics Gnome Power Management, perhaps it
needs to see two consecutive low readings before it initiates
shutdown?

===

Originally I had big issues with the Dell Wireless 5530 HSPA card,
after loggin a bug and testing updates from Dan Williams, he got it
working, I think there might be a niggle or two left, but recent
updates seem to have broken it again, I ought to do some more tests on
the current version.

===

> bluetooth enable/disable work from mjg.

The bluetooth on/off toggle was a nice addition to F12, I do get an
infrequent issue where blutooth mouse doesn't respond following a
suspend/resume, and needs un-pairing/re-pairing before it works again,
probably not Dell specific.