I got a new laptop on Friday, so most of my weekend was spent getting it up and running.

The laptop itself is a Dell Latitude D620, which is a surprisingly big improvement over the D610 I got just last summer. The processor is a Core 2 Duo, and I really just can’t say enough good things about this chip. It’s a huge improvement over the Pentium M in the old machine (which was pretty good itself), and doesn’t seem to have the heat problems that the Core Duos.

In addition to the better processor, the physical design of the Latitude has improved immensely. While it still doesn’t look as spiffy as a MacBook, the top and the bottom halves now look like the were designed to be part of the same machine. It’s also slimmer and lighter that my old D610, and overall, just feels a lot nicer.

As usual, I wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu. I went with 6.10, even though 7.04 is out in a few weeks. This is my work machine, and Linux already has enough quirks and weirdness without having to worry about the bugs associated with a release candidate.

The installation itself went smoothly, but when I booted into the new OS for the first time, it failed to find my wireless card. Dell has switched from using the trust old Intel wireless chipset in the Latitude series to a Broadcom chipset, 4311 in my case. Broadcom’s firmware is closed-source, so the drive that comes with Ubuntu has been reverse-engineered. As a result, it does not support all Broadcom cards, mine included.

Fortunately, the NdisWrapper project provides a means of tricking Linux into using Windows wireless drivers. With a bit of help from the Ubuntu Forums, I was able to get my wireless connection up and running.

Next on the list were the drives for the graphics card, an Nvida Quadro NVS. Again, Ubuntu comes with a default driver for this card, but it’s not particularly good. On the other hand, Nvidia provides a Linux driver, but it is closed-source and can be problematic.

Installation of the new video driver was a breeze. However, a few minutes after restarting with the new driver, I got a message about an IRQ conflict, at which point my wireless connection stopped working. Sadly, the proprietary Nvidia driver has some conflict with the proprietary Broadcom driver, so the two cannot run concurrently. Neither company appears to have any real interest in fixing the problem, and the answer on the Linux side is “It’s a third-party driver issue, not ours.”

For now, I’m obviously choosing a working wireless connection over a 3D video rendering. Since I’m not a gamer, it’s not that big a deal to me. There are, however, some unfortunate side-effects of the crappy default video driver, the main one being an annoying flickering whenever the display fades out due to inactivity. Theoretically, this issue will be resolved by the 7.04 release of Ubuntu.

There are also the usual problems with getting the machine to figure out that it’s on a docking station. The problem here is, once again, the X-based video system. As it currently stands, I have two different xorg.conf files—one for when the laptop is undocked, and the other for when it’s on the docking station. Currently, I’m manually switching between the two, but that’s clearly not a sustainable solution. Eventually, I’ll need to figure out a way (probably a script) to select the correct file automatically. Right now, though, I don’t have the time to figure it out.