I installed ubunut gutsy for D830 from 4GB a pen drive . With some updates everything works fine .

I didnt want to mess my windows drive - hence the USB soultion .

The graphics was very choppy - youtube would flicker ... But I had a spare hard drive sitting on my desk ( much after installation) and I mounted swap on hard drive - works balzing fast now .

- laptop does run a bit warmer than windows --- very unlike linux

- When I tried Gutsy 64 bit - it could not load the graphics at all — there was no X ... i didnt have any more patience for that .

- Another note about this laptop - it runs cool and silent for the first couple of weeks , when you have enough stuff on you hard drive — all those vanish into thin air .. It is one of the hottest laptops I have had ..... nothing makes it hotter than watching something on NETFLIX .... i can swear i can fry a omlette on its back ...

I've had a D830 for about a month, installed FC7 on it, have had no issues that I can't live with until the FC/alsa developers include fixes. I use it primarily as a work/e-mail/browsing/travel machine, not recreation.

1) IIRC the nv driver worked for me with NVS140, but I switched to the livna repackaging of the nvidia binary drivers immediately

2) audio doesn't work, known problem with ALSA, I've read that the short-term fix is to compile the kernel with ALSA in the kernel (not as a module)

3) I've read that the DVD problem has been fixed, don't remember how I installed, but I'd swear I used the rescue CD and then installed the dvd image from an external hard drive just for convenience.

4) I downloaded the 4956AGN firmware from the Intel web site, easy instructions once I found them (navigation there confusing), had zero problem installing and running, it's working way better than the wistron atheros miniPC card I had in my inspiron 8500.. way stronger rx signal

Two annoying problems I haven't been able to diagnose:

A) suspend to RAM doesn't work. Or rather it does, but the LCD never comes back when I take it out of suspend. I followed the diagnostics on the HAL website here:

http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/quirk-suspend-index.html

but the only useful information that came back was "HAL doesn't support the nvidia binary drivers."
I found no useful information in the README that comes with the nvidia release. just looked at the nvidia forum, but wasn't able to figure how to search.

Open to suggestions from anyone who has gotten suspend to work on *their* D830 with the proprietary nvidia drivers.

B) PCcards that present a USB interface to the system are rejected by the ACPI and/or ohci_hcd subsystem with the following error in syslog:

Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: PCI: Enabling device 0000:04:00.0 (0000 -> 0002)
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:04:00.0A -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:04:00.0 disabled
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: ohci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: init 0000:04:00.0 fail, -14
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: ohci_hcd: probe of 0000:04:00.0 failed with error -14
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: PCI: Enabling device 0000:04:00.1 (0000 -> 0002)
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:04:00.1B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:04:00.1 disabled
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: ohci_hcd 0000:04:00.1: init 0000:04:00.1 fail, -14
Sep 23 10:26:43 labrea kernel: ohci_hcd: probe of 0000:04:00.1 failed with error -14

This with 2.6.22.5-76.fc7.

by "present USB interface to the system" I mean cards which when inserted on another machine invoke USB handlers and install USB hubs or create devices like /dev/ttyUSB0. The cards I've tried include Verizon EVDO cards (Sierra Wireless, Novatel, Kyocera) and brand X PCcard->USB adapters (ie add two USB ports to the system with a PCcard). The Novatel installs on my fc6 inspiron 8500 as /dev/ttyACM0, but I think that's still USB.

PCcards that do *not* present a USB interface to the system seem to work just fine, eg ethernet.

Incidentally, USB devices that plug into the USB ports work just fine.

I haven't seen this PCcard/USB issue mentioned anywhere else, so I'd be grateful if someone could try it on their D830 and either mail me or post a comment here. No idea whether it's an ICH8 issue or an ACPI implementation issue. Oh, forgot to mention, the EVDO cards work just fine on the D830 under windozeXP, so it's not a hardware fault in the D830.

Incidentally, the IBM T61P with the NVS140 is an almost identical machine to the D830, so that's another place to check for solutions to problems with fc7 on Dell's D830, I would guess that up to things that can be tied to BIOS or ACPI issues, anything that works on the T61P should work on the D830, and v-v. And ditto "broken". Just be sure doing comparisons that the machine configurations are the same.

and C) not exactly a problem, I just haven't looked into it, AHCI SATA v compatible SATA or whatever. The BIOS has the drive interface set as 'compatible'. I read somewhere that it's easy to switch between the two, but when I changed to AHCI in the BIOS, it wouldn't boot, panic'd because it couldn't find the disc, I think. This is probably a trivial sort of thing, I just haven't followed up on it.
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A couple other suggestions: I bought 1 stick of 512M DDR2 RAM from Dell, pulled it out and replaced with 4G of Mushkin RAM for $200, cheapest I could find at the time. I think several vendors are now selling at about that price.

I bought the 80g SATA from Dell, not quite cheapest, but only slightly more than 60g, pulled it out, replaced it with a 250g WD from newegg. (A few comments from customers at the newegg website about SMART failing on the WD w/i a couple of weeks, so turn on SMART logging or buy some other disc.)

No problems on either, but if you do this *be* *sure* *to* *be* *careful* playing with DIMMs .. follow the instructions. I damaged either one memory socket or the memory drivers on my 8500 by being a little too cavalier seating the DIMM.

- js.

Keys: linux FC7 Fedora Core 7 Dell Latitude D830 PCcard PCMCIA USB ACPI suspend nvidia binary proprietary driver T61p
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