Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 7500

When I heard Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger was out, I thought I’d give it a try on an old retired and ridiculously heavy Dell 7500 laptop. The results I admit were quite impressive because it simply works. I was also pleasantly surprised that suspend to disk a.k.a. hibernation worked out of the box.

Laptop Specs

• Pentium 3 (Coppermine) 650mhz
• Fujitsu 20 gig drive
• 128 MB sdram
• Floppy drive
• CD/DVD-ROM drive
• Touchpad

System Components

Component Name	Comments
CD/DVD-ROM	Works fine with default config
Floppy drive	Works fine with default config
Sound ES1978	Works fine with default config
Graphics and X	Works fine with default config
Modem	Not Tested
S-Video out	Not Tested
Infared	Not Tested

Problems

One minor problem encountered was speedstep toggling the speed that gave a “cpufreq: change failed” error and seem to make the system sluggish. Speedstep is allows the system to change a cpu’s processing speed according to system demands in an effort to reduce power consumption. Disabling it appeared to fix the problem as a work around.

When I was looking a solution, some people suggested that the wrong speedstep kernel modules were being loaded but that was not the case in this laptop.

Conclusion

I felt that Ubuntu Linux worked great on this laptop considering its specs, it definitely out-performs Windows XP on that same laptop. Its battery life is also quite good but that may be why that brick of a laptop is so bulky and heavy, when I find the time I will try out the s-video output and convert it to a media center.