Hardware profile:
CPU: Intel Core i7-2720QM CPU @ 2.20GH (4 cores, 8 threads)
Memory: 8GB
Display: 1920x1080
Graphics: Nvidia NVS 4200M (512M)
Hard drive: 500GB/7200rpm
WiFi: Intel Centrino Advanced-N + WiMAX 6250 AGN
Bluetooth: Dell Wireless 375 bluetooth module+Dell Travel BT mouse
Stage 1: Partition the disk. It was very tempting to remove Windows altogether. However, unfortunately, sometimes one needs Windows (for example, Netflix chose non-portable and buggy Silverlight rather than portable and more stable Adobe) and Virtual Machines do not always work well.
You immediately realize - for the nth time - that you want to have as little as possible to do Microsoft and Windows. The 500G disk comes partitioned in ONE chunk, and you cannot shrink it, using the built-in Windows tools, more than to 50%, although only 5% of disk space is used! The reason was that some history files for Explorer are marked as unmovable. And you cannot even delete them because they do not really exist!
I used EASEUS partition manager (http://www.easeus.com/) that shrunk the partition without any problem whatsoever. It simply ignores non-existent unmovable files.
Sage 2: Installation
I installed Fedora 15 from a Live CD (KDE spin). Several things required a bit of tweaking:
1. The laptop comes with Optimus TM enabled, which results in the nVidia card being shadowed by the on-board graphics controller. BIOS says that this feature should be disables for OS different from Windows.
2. For some reason (completely unclear from the diagnostics) wireless refused to operate until I rebooted into Windows, connected and then rebooted again with Fedora.
3. Once the proprietary nVidia driver is installed, plymouth uses text (this is a common phenomenon). After a bit of research on the web I found that one should add vga=ask in the command line for the kernel. That shows available video modes at the next boot. For E6520 the right one is 0x34D (so after testing it one can replace vga=ask with vga=0x34D). Needless to say, nouveau should be disabled. However, I've spent a lot of time on this since nvidia-settings started crashing. I suspected that plymouth loads some kernel module interfering with nvidia, but it turned out that it's a known bug: nvidia-settings (270.41.06) crashes if $HOME/.nvidia-settings-rc exists. The solution is to run it with --no-config option. The problem disappeared after a couple of upgrades.
4.Bluetooth (and Dell Bluetooth travel mouse): I expected a real fight, but it was relatively easy, although I wish I knew that bluetoothd does not start by default.
The mouse integrates seamlessly with KDE.
What does not work yet:
Reboot: any attempt to reboot the system (from Linux or from Windows) results in a system halt. Windows also turns the power off; Linux doesn't. Still working on it.
VM/Windows partition: I am still trying to figure out how to boot Windows 7 from a virtual machine. VMware-server cannot install properly on Fedora 15, and VMware-player lacks the capability. Besides, Microsoft eliminated hardware profiles from Windows 7 (perhaps, because people were doing just that) and I have heard that once you boot from a Virtual Machine, you cannot boot normally, as the system thinks that it was copied illegally and requires a new activation code.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI have a E6520, too (with i5).
I'm unable to configure NVidia hdmi sound card (analog work well).
And touchpad is detectd as mouse so multitouch doesn't work
I do not have an HDMI cable or an HDMI capable TV so I have not tried that one yet.
ReplyDeleteApparently, the touchpad issue is resolved (see my next post)
ReplyDeleteadd reboot=pci to your kernel boot line to resolve the reboot hang
ReplyDeleteThank you, it resolved the issue
ReplyDeleteDid you have any luck getting the win7 image on vmware to work. i am struggling with the same thing. the image did not convert to a virtualbox .vdi (issues), so unless i can get that to work, i may have to get rid of this laptop... thanks
ReplyDeleteI must admit I did not try too hard... First, I only tried VMPlayer and apparently it does not have a capability to run a system installed on a physical disk as a virtual machine (if I am mistaken, I would appreciate if someone could explain to me how to do it). Second, I noticed that VMPlayer is rather unstable on this platform (apparently, it has some hardware issue, as I also use it on a different laptop with the same version of Fedora and of the kernel) even with a Windows XP virtual box. Since I only need Windows to watch movies on Netflix (something I was not doing much recently), I decided to put this issue on the back burner...
ReplyDelete