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Dell E521 and PCLinuxOS 2007 Final

It’s been a process of elimination to get my Dell E521 working. Previous workarounds with boot options didn’t work…so I had to use a combination of boot options to get things working nice and stable.

I powered up the PCLinuxOS 2007 Final LiveCD and began the installation to disk. During the bootloader configuration I appended the following text to the end of my linux, failsafe, and framebuffer entry:

noacpi irqpoll pci=routeirq

From there, I saved, closed all programs and rebooted. Upon first boot I opened Synaptic and installed the PCLinuxOS .a64 Kernel which is optimized for 64 bit processors. I then opened up the PCLinuxOS Control Center yet again, went to the boot section and altered my grub bootloader again with the same information in the code above. I rebooted to make sure my changes worked.

When logging in this time, I opened Synaptic and installed the Nvidia 97xx drivers for my graphics card (Fata1ity 7600GT). After this installs you’re prompted to restart X and upon login…you should be presented with quite a stable and quick desktop.

Hopefully this works well for those of you out there that are using E521’s or E520’s as I believe they have the same mainboard (not sure though).

PCLinuxOS 2007, USR5411 MaxG Wireless Primer

So you’ve just installed PCLinuxOS 2007 TR4 on your laptop and your wireless card is detected! Finally, a distro gets it right! However, you’re not too sure how to proceed next…do you manage the device through the PCLinuxOS Control Center? Do you start another program and work that way? Do you use KDE’s built in applet to monitor things? What’s next?

This is something that is often expressed in the forums at pclinuxos.com and something anyone associated with this fine distribution is glad to see…that is working wireless. However, as noted above, people often wonder how to control their wireless device and how to move in and out of various different environments. I’d like to share how I do wireless on my Thinkpad a22m.

I have a US Robotics 5411 MaxG PCMCIA card for my laptop. PCLinuxOS 2007 detects it out of the box but doesn’t install it by default. The reason for this is that PCLinuxOS doesn’t assume to know how you want to install it…either using the built into the kernel support for the broadcom wireless chip or ndiswrapper…which is a program that allows Windows drivers for wireless to be used in Linux. I elected to go with Ndiswrapper since I had some problems with the broadcom driver in PCLinuxOS. Ndiswrapper is installed by default in PCLinuxOS which makes this process even easier…but the process still requires some forethought and I’ll share with you what I did to make this process go smoothly and easily.

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PCLinuxOS passes Ubuntu

Interesting tidbit of information…amidst all the hype about Ubuntu and Dell PC’s…the little distro that could has marched up to the #1 spot for the span of 7 days.

It’s important to note that the last test release took place 6 days ago…so that could be part of things…but it’s also important to note that PCLOS forums have seen over 700 new members in the past week an a half. That’s quite a bit of interest in my favorite Desktop Linux 🙂 Makes me happy to be part of the team of people that help make this distro special.

Give this a digg if you find it worthy info 🙂

Speed Tweaking PCLinuxOS 2007 TR3

Using PCLinuxOS 2007 TR3 for the last few weeks, I’ve noticed VAST improvements over the .93a release. The most noticable of these is boot times. My boot time is absolutely amazing on this Dell E521n…it averages 30-40 seconds. That’s right. 30-40 SECONDS. I was floored the first time I booted after install. I thought I had done something wrong. I quickly rebooted and got out the stopwatch and recorded 32 seconds as my official time. I rebooted another 5-6 times and averaged in between 30-40 seconds each time and was closer to 30 on 8 out of 10 boots. Absolutely amazing.

Linux, with projects like upstart which is being considered for the next release of Ubuntu, are getting to the point now where boot times will drop considerably. This is welcome as far as I’m concerned…it allows you to get going right away with your business be it personal or other.

Once you’re logged in though…many people don’t touch the OS itself and instead leave it at the default settings. For most people this is ok…as not having something set to be optimized is ok and most distro rollers setup their distros so that they cause the least amount of problems for the most variety of hardware. For me, I like to mess around. I like to play. “I like the night life…I like to boogie”

So without further silliness and introductional nonsense, I proudly present a bunch of data that I gathered from various sources (cited where possible) and a few tricks of my own that will allow most rpm based distros to tweak their way into improved performance. Since I did this specifically for the PCLinuxOS community though, I’ve titled the article accordingly. As it is, the article should work for most Fedora’s and Mandriva’s and possibly even OpenSuse.

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PCLinuxOS 2007 Beta Available

Texstar and the PCLinuxOS crew have announced the availability of the first public beta for PCLinuxOS 2007. Tuxmachines has quite a nice writeup on some of the interesting changes seen with this incarnation of PCLinuxOS.

I sure hope that this release gives PCLinuxOS the attention it deserves. It truly is a wonder in the world of distros for Linux. Powerful enough for those of us that love to compile our own software yet easy enough for many new users to feel right at home.

I previously blogged that PCLinuxOS was rebranding itself for this release with a community elected logo. This beta shows off this new logo which was elected for its simplicity and ability to be recognized immediately. Contained inside the release are many additions made by the Beautification Project at mypclinuxos.com. Gryphen, the project leader, did an outstanding job pushing the team to such polish and precision. Thanks to all of those on the Beautification Team for such a fantastic job making PCLinuxOS revolutionary yet again.

PCLinuxOS 2007 looks fantastic! If you’d like to see what we’re all enjoying, head to the download page and enjoy a Linux like you haven’t seen before 🙂 Please note that this is a BETA release. The final release is due out by the end of this month…there is NOT a supported way to update to the final release…so install the beta on a system you don’t mind losing when the final release comes out!

Dell E521, Linux, Freezing USB Mouse Problem Resolved

I hit a snag this past week while testing a few beta releases with the latest kernels. I bought an AMD X2 3800 Dell E521 with a Gig of RAM for US $409 and free shipping during a dealnews.com dealfest…I feel I got a good deal. So I’ve been waiting to put my favorite distro, PCLinuxOS on it…waiting for the release of .94 due out sometime this month. In the meantime, Windows XP has been on that computer and I’ve been dual booting distros I’d like to try.

The snag I hit came when booting into just about any 2.6.X environment in Linux…the mouse would be fine one minute, and then a few minutes into things the mouse would freeze. This is a USB Logitech mouse…and I found it odd that it would freeze up but the printer (HP PSC 1210v) would work just fine.

After a bit of research when pointed in the right direction of the kernel developer for PCLinuxOS, I came to realize that I wasn’t alone. Many on Ubuntu’s forums and also Linuxquestions, and Linuxforums had reported the same problems…most without any resolution. The good news is that I found a resolution to my problems 😀

Update the BIOS! I did a major forehead smack when it was the last thing I thought of when it should have been the first. After updating the BIOS to the latest and greatest version from dell.com, I was back in business with no freezes of my USB Mouse. Hopefully, if you also run a Dell E521, you won’t bash your head repeatedly against the wall like I did.