Bye-bye, Inspiron 1100.....hello, Latitude D630!

[mikewalsh]

Evening, gang.

Well, I knew it would happen eventually. The anciente, 2002-vintage, Dell Inspiron 1100 lappie has finally popped its clogs. The display is misbehaving, and it won't even attempt to boot any more. One moment it was working fine, the next - following a re-boot - nada. Nowt. Zilch.

Personally, I think it's the graphics adapter. Either that, or it's the display cable, where it winds its tortuous way up through the middle of the left-hand hinge. I've been expecting it to act-up for at least the last 5 years... Hell; it was 20 years old, and stuck on 32-bit with an early P4. I've definitely had my money's worth out of the old girl.

I thought it was the perfect time to replace it. Wouldn't you?

--------------------------------------

So; I did some digging around on eBay earlier.....and have found a nice-condition, pre-owned Dell Latitude (a D630). Core2Duo @ 2.2GHz (64-bit;yay!) - 4 GB RAM - a 120 GB SSD - it's even got a DVD/CD combo drive, 4 USB ports AND a PCI-Express slot. By all accounts the internal wifi is a bit weak on these, so I should be able to use my NetGear PCI wifi card with it.

It DOES come with Win10 pre-installed. That'll be the first thing to go....!!

I was just wondering which of you guys'n'gals have had experience of these D630s? They seem quite highly thought of for a Linux box, and appear to enjoy a very solid reputation. Any pitfalls I should be aware of?

(Oh, BTW; what's with the battery pack being at the front.....and having that black plastic 'handle' thingy sticking out? It seems to be present on some models, but not others... Anybody know?)

This pic shows it quite clearly:-

https://itsurplus.byu.edu/uploads/2/5/1 ... _w847.jpeg

Only thing I can think of is that there's just so MUCH other stuff included as standard, they probably had nowhere left to put the darned thing! Or is it just a "beefier" one for reps on the road?

(EDIT:- Yep; look like that's the answer. As standard they came with a 6-cell battery pack. This appears to be a high-capacity, 9-cell pack (6600 mAh). We'll see how worn-out it is, though by all accounts you can get these things for the D630 in a ton of places online.....and they're very reasonably priced, too. Can't be bad.)

Mike.

[wizard]

Have one and have been setting up a HD for a friend who has one. Sent it to him today, Win7 & Puppy Fossapup64 dual boot. Used mine daily for about 5 years and is still a good machine. They came with choice of two graphics chips ATI & Nvidia Quadro NVS-135M. If you are lucky you got the ATI. The Nvidia was in that group that all laptop makers that used them had problems with the chip overheating, coming loose from the MB and failing. Mine has the Nvidia and I had to remove and reflow the MB, rework the heat sink and throttle the CPU to mitigate the problem. It is still going ( I have 3 HP laptops that had the same issue & the rework only lasted about a year) . Make sure to blow out the heatsink/fan and have plenty of clearance for air circulation on the bottom. Anyway, hope you have the ATI and if so it will be a real workhorse.

The protrusion on the front is from a high capacity battery, standard battery doesn't do that.

Let me know if you have any questions about it.

wizard

[mikewalsh]

@wizard :-

Cheers, Wiz.......will do.

This is the one in question, BTW, though of course all it says is 'integrated onboard graphics'. No clue as to what I'm getting, it seems, so I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best!

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/284906443511 ... SwGxViggzf

It may be a bit longer getting here than what they say; the unions are hitting Britain with a blizzard of industrial action ATM in protest at where prices are heading. The postal workers were at it today, in fact, so it's anybody's guess when it'll turn up.

We'll see!

PS:- That little blue button thing in the keyboard; is that the famous 'pointing-stick' I've heard so much about? As for underside clearance, I'll do what I did with the old Dell; add some larger rubber 'bump-stop' type feet, which give around 3/4" clearance.......and if I sit with it in my lap, it'll be sitting on a tray anyway. I learnt that trick with the 1100; the cooling solution was not brilliant, and the P4s run so hot (desktop version in the 1100) that if you weren't careful you could roast your gonads!

Mike.

[wizard]

You've got all the right ideas for the cooling, just be sure to blow out the cobs once in a while. The blue button is in fact the "pointing stick" and is my mouse control of choice. Much easier for me since you don't have to take your hands off the keys and you're not continually bumping it by accident like a touch pad. Better too for me since my hands shake a little in me old age. Doesn't matter now, but before I retired it was much easier in tight quarters like an airline seat. The pics in the listing look like it is very good cosmetic shape.
You might want to make yourself an image of the W10 install just in case you wanted to play with it sometime. I use the free Aomei backup or Rescuezilla, both do a good job.

wizard

[bigpup]

@mikewalsh

On the same page as your link.

They have one with an Intel i3 processor and it costs less.

Look at this great feature it has:
Battery : Guaranteed to hold charge for at least 1 hour

[dcung]

I have 4 of these D630 - they've served me well.
3 with T8300 (2.4GHz), 1 with T7500 (2.2GHz) - All with Nvidia Quadro NVS-135M.

Just FYI, in case it's of interest to you.
Bill (rcrsn51) was testing RustDesk remote desktop app, and I was curious and tested on these D630.
Turned out T7500 has limitation. Not a big deal, since now that you can find T8300 or better for peanut on eBay if required and just swap the CPU.

Performance wise, I don't think there's much difference between 2.2 vs 2.4 GHz.

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 035#p60035

[Grey]

As standard they came with a 6-cell battery pack. This appears to be a high-capacity, 9-cell pack (6600 mAh).

I've also been wanting to buy a 9-cell battery for my Acer monster for a long time. But so far I haven't gathered myself in any way. A real Japanese one is noticeably more expensive than Chinese "new models".

Also find out if the laptop works without a battery, just from the power supply. It can be important

[mikewalsh]

@bigpup :-

@mikewalsh

On the same page as your link.

They have one with an Intel i3 processor and it costs less.

Look at this great feature it has:
Battery : Guaranteed to hold charge for at least 1 hour

Heh. I know that you - and indeed, probably many others, too - have great difficulty in understanding why anyone should voluntarily pick older equipment when newer stuff is available at a lower price. Makes no sense, does it?

There IS method in the madness.

I know for a fact that these old Latitudes were built like the proverbial brick outhouse, 'cos they were targeted at those who spent most of their time on the road. Also, the Core2Duos have a very good reputation across the entire community as a good basic dual-core for running most distros smoothly......even today.

And I just like older equipment. Always have.

This will only ever be used outside in the summer.....but I DO want something I can stream NetFlix/watch videos on. I intend to do a main install of Fossapup64 on it, so's I can use any of my up-to-date portable browsers (and other portables for various activities).

4 GB RAM and a 120 GB SSD ought to be ample for this. The big rig - the HP - is what will be used for any serious data-crunching, like video-editing, because it's got the legs & the 'grunt' for it. I don't intend to use the Dell for this.

I'll see how it goes when it turns up. May need a new battery pack/CMOS battery, yet. Win10 needs nuking. And I'll probably strip it down and give it a thorough spring-clean, too. I have to get these basics sorted first..!

Mike.

[mouldy]

I have couple old D430, they were the mini version. I may have a D630 though it also might be a D620, cant remember. Obviously I have too many computer. Some people bring home stray cats, I bring home discarded old computers. Actually I pick one desktop and one laptop and could call it good. I am impressed with that little Dell Chromebook that I changed to UEFI bios with MrChromebox. And I dont say that lightly as I really dont like those little 11.6 bargain basement screens. It has that tiny 15GB eMMC but not as much limitation as one would think, it can boot from usb so... It feels higher quality than lot of the windows cloudbooks/netbooks. Think it was made for schools so they have to build them kinda tough to put up with kid abuse.

Oh those old latitudes with AMD Turion2 processors were pretty robust. Though their downside was less than great graphics.

[wizard]

@mouldy

Obviously I have too many computers

If you find you don't, I can send you some of mine

wizard

[mikewalsh]

Well, now. I'm quite pleased..!

My "new" Latitude D630 has turned up; around an hour ago, in fact. It's in beautiful condition, given its age. Yes, there's the odd bit of grime & dirt that escaped the cleaning cloth - as you'd expect - but there's remarkably little cosmetic damage at all.

I've downloaded the User's Guide from Dell, and I'm familiarising myself with it to begin with. I'm going to have to boot into Win 10, if only to shut it down correctly.....otherwise, I can see the SSD giving me issues when I try to run a Live Puppy to wipe the 'beast' off the drive.

Chock full of nifty wee features, too. Ambient light sensor for when you're on battery, so it auto-adjusts screen brightness. It's got a serial port, for Chrissakes.....and a mini-FireWire, too. Despite what the piccie on the eBay page showed, this comes with the 'standard', 6-cell battery.....not the high-capacity 9-cell one, that sticks out the front. The battery pack even has a 'condition meter' built-in to it. Crazy!

And it has some kind of docking connector built-in to the underneath? Anybody know what this was used for?

Mike.

[bigpup]

it has some kind of docking connector built-in to the underneath? Anybody know what this was used for?

Maybe for this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/354204849446?h ... Sw9wli7A91

[wizard]

@bigpup is correct, it is for the port replicator/docking station. I have one and used it, puts the keyboard at a slight angle that's better for typing. Also makes it easier to connect/disconnect from hard wired peripherals.

wizard

[mikewalsh]

@wizard :-

Complex-looking gadget, indeed. Still, at least I can see what all those cuts-out on the back are FOR, now!

I got to thinking. I didn't need to worry about shutting Win 10 down properly. The D630 is MBR BIOS.....no UEFI. Ergo, no SecureBoot/FastBoot crap; it's all part of the UEFI spec-sheet, isn't it?

I used F12 for the one-time boot menu, and Fossapup64 fired straight-up from a LiveCD. Everything worked nicely; it's got the cruddy Broadcom B43 wireless card, but I've side-stepped that.....by using my NetGear PCMCIA wireless card from the old Dell. The Latitude's got the exact same slot, and Fossa's k5.4.53 has still got the ath5k driver.

Sorted!

I've exterminated Win 10/re-partitioned/re-formatted, and done a frugal of Fossa64 to sda1 (40 GB, "Pups"). Sda2 is 60 GB, and will be my "Data" partition. I have a 128 GB SATA SSD, and the Nvidia graphics chip (haven't checked yet, but I assume it must be, 'cos the nouveau driver is in use). Curiously, it isn't giving me the same problems on the D630 as the GT 710 does under Fossa on the big HP rig. I think I'll leave it at the nouveau driver, 'cos it's behaving very sweetly. YT plays fine from Chrome-portable.....and so does NetFlix. And THAT's the one I really wanted to nail.....

Posting from it now, using PaleMoon-portable. That 'pointing-stick' is going to take a bit of getting used-to, but I already like the action.....and I can see why the two sets of buttons, now I think about it.

Mike.

[wizard]

Yippee!, new toy

wizard

[mikewalsh]

As pretty much expected, I think I'll be needing a new battery pack before long.

Despite the tray battery meter telling me that the most recent charge was around 4140maH (normal max for the 6-cell pack is 4400maH), I only get about 1 hr 15-20 mins out of the thing. I suspect this is in part due to the fact that the battery was stone dead flat when it turned up.

This is NOT good news where Li-ion batteries are concerned!

However; eBay and Amazon are chock-full of these things.......and at very reasonable prices, too. So the choice boils down to one thing, really; do I stick with the 6-cell, or do I go for one of the 9-cell jobs that sticks out the front?

Decisions, decisions..... (Even 10 years ago, finding a battery pack for the 1100 was getting almost impossible; they were like hen's teeth. Very rare! Thankfully, the situation with the D600-series seems to be vastly different; perhaps showing just how popular these machines were?)

Mike.

[vtpup]

Congratulations on the new lappy, Mike! Great fun to set up something new the way you like it with a clean HD and Puppy(s). And kudos for using an older one for as long as it was physically able. Because of Puppy it was never unnecessarily obsoleted, but lived to die of natural causes. R.I.P! And also for rescuing another well made "experienced" laptop.

There are computer users, and then there are computerists, And among the computerists, there's a small subset of smart computerists. A perfectly good mature computer purchased at bargain price, fully equipped with a variety of ports and storage devices running a highly efficient and configurable open software OS is my idea of smart computing.

Also, I think most LI-Ion batts used in computers have cut-off circuitry so when "dead" are not actually discharged below threshold, and often batts that have been discharged to that point need a few cycles to regain their best present capacity. One common problem though in older lappys is that the RTC battery needs replacing. If the BIOS date starts to need resetting, or other BIOS problems start showing up, that's a frequent reason. And I have to say that upgrading my 13 year old Acer's internal network card with a current intel chipped one has actually improved download speeds even on an old 802.11n DSL modem. And definitely faster than a PCMCIA card I once had, or a USB dongle. Mine took a Mini-pcie card that was ~$30 and once the back was off the laptop (23 screws!) was as easy as adding RAM. Videos on youtube helped me make the decision to do it, and let me see that it was actually mini PCIe compatible.

Good luck with the new Puptop!

[mikewalsh]

@vtpup :-

Ah, that's another thing I like about this Latitude, compared to ye anciente Inspiron. The 'RTC' battery, as you call it.

On the Inspiron, it was an absolute PITA to replace. You had to completely strip the thing down to the mobo. The mobo then had to be unscrewed from the case, 'cos the battery was on the other side.....under the palm-rest. As if that wasn't enough, yes; it WAS rechargeable.....but it had be soldered in place. And my soldering skills are rubbish; the results tend to make pigeon-droppings look professional!

On the D630, it's a wee sealed pack with a short twisted-pair wire going to a tiny plug. I haven't investigated replacing it yet, but it's already looking to be a shed-load easier.....

And no end of places sell these, too.

-----------------------------

Perhaps PCMCIA cards ARE slow by modern standards, I couldn't say. The D630 has an internal Broadcom wi-fi card - the one that needs the infamous b43 driver - but I honestly couldn't be arsed to set it up. I have a perfectly serviceable NetGear PCMCIA card; the Latitude has exactly the same slot as the Inspiron had.....and Fossapup's k5.4.53 kernel still supports the ath5k diver. Plug it in, and it's a piece of cake to set up. Summat of a "no-brainer", if I'm perfectly honest!

Despite 'only' being around 55-60 MBps max, that's more than enough to stream NetFlix. And that's about the most demanding network activity I have...

I DO like my sci-fi..!!

-----------------------------

Maybe I'm weird, but I like older hardware. Much of it was built to last; it tends to be easy to work on (and you CAN work on the stuff I like).....and I prefer to go with models that have a good reputation. And the older Latitudes have all this in spades. Nobody, it seems, has a bad word to say about them (and Dells have always been my favourite make by a country mile).....

I promised myself I'd get one of these D600-series eventually. I'm glad I did; I can see now just why they were so popular. That had to be the easiest Puppy install I've done yet. No messing about in the BIOS; run the LiveCD; nuke Win 10 and re-partition/format the drive; copy the files over; and run Grub4DOS. And that's all there was to it!

Is it any wonder I love Puppies?

Mike.

[Grey]

So the choice boils down to one thing, really; do I stick with the 6-cell, or do I go for one of the 9-cell jobs that sticks out the front?

The other day I found a 4400 battery from the manufacturer TOPON in a local store. I've never heard of this manufacturer before, to be honest. This is a battery compatible with the AS10D31 battery of Acer laptops. And I thought... maybe it's just better to buy two 6-cell batteries at a local store than to buy one for 9 cells and wait for it to arrive. 4400x2=8800, of course they need to be periodically replaced by one another, but still ...

[mikewalsh]

Well, now.

I rather suspected this was going to happen. I've always espoused the notion that when running older hardware, you'll usually get better results from running a "date-sympathetic" OS from the era when your hardware was built.

Okay; that doesn't necessarily hold water. To support said notion, this D630 would then want to be running something like Lucid.....which, as we're all aware, won't run anything up to date..!

------------------------------

I started off with a frugal install of Fossapup64. It boots just fine, and can run tons of up-to-date apps.....but usage over the last few days shows that, on this Latitude at least, many apps regularly cause the OS to freeze solid - totally & utterly unresponsive - necessitating a hard power-off as the only recovery option. Not good!

So; I've decided on an older 64-bit Puppy, and have settled on Xenialpup64. I completed the install of this along with full customization last night. I've been running Xenialpup64 on here for several hours today, and it's behaved itself beautifully.....smooth as silk, with nary a 'freeze-up' in sight. Possibly related to the Nvidia GVS-135m GPU; it's quite an elderly chip, and hasn't been supported since the 340 driver. It could be that Fossapup's in-house "nouveau" driver module has been reverse-engineered from newer versions of the official driver, therefore certain functions of the Nvidia chip aren't properly supported any longer. And the 340 .run file simply won't compile under Fossapup, 'cos all of its expected dependencies are considerably older than what Fossapup is packing.....

That's MY theory. I could be wrong - probably am! - but it makes sense to me.

Xenialpup will still run my favourite 64-bit Chromium 'clones' - primarily Brave, these days, and also Slimjet (these give me YouTube & NetFlix with no issues). SeaMonkey and Pale Moon also run very sweetly here as well. And most of my 64-bit portables also appear perfectly happy, so.....I think Xenialpup64 is just a better "match" for the hardware.....and, truth to tell, I've never been one of those that absolutely MUST constantly have the very newest of everything.

I'd sooner run something older that's 'stable', and doesn't throw a wobbly at the first sign of something it doesn't like. But that's just me. Wouldn't necessarily suit anybody else.

(*shrug*)

Mike.

[greengeek]

Xenialpup will still run my favourite 64-bit Chromium 'clones' - primarily Brave, these days, and also Slimjet (these give me YouTube & NetFlix with no issues). SeaMonkey and Pale Moon also run very sweetly here as well. And most of my 64-bit portables also appear perfectly happy, so.....I think Xenialpup64 is just a better "match" for the hardware. and, truth to tell, I've never been one of those that absolutely MUST constantly have the very newest of everything.

I'd sooner run something older that's 'stable', and doesn't throw a wobbly at the first sign of something it doesn't like. But that's just me. Wouldn't necessarily suit anybody else.

Hear, hear. I think xenial (both 32 and 64) are great bases for many PCs. (I still love Tahr32 also).
(ps: my son uses a D630 so I am watching this thread with interest...)

[mikewalsh]

@greengeek :-

Hear, hear. I think xenial (both 32 and 64) are great bases for many PCs. (I still love Tahr32 also).
(ps: my son uses a D630 so I am watching this thread with interest...)

I'm still getting the hang of it, Ian. I got very, very used to the limitations on the old Inspiron, and the necessary 'workarounds' to keep stuff functional.....but there ARE limits to what you can do with a 32-bit single-core P4.

The D630's Core2Duo is SO much better than that old P4 it's untrue.....bit it's still a 14-year old chip. Yes, it's 64-bit; yes, it's dual core......and yes, it's got more advanced instruction sets than my old Athlon64 X2 dual-core had, but it does still have limitations. So it necessarily means perhaps running an older OS than I would have liked, but I've always found the Xenialpups to be very stable & rock-solid, OOTB.

ATM, I'm happy with it. Fingers crossed!

Mike.

[bigpup]

Fossapup64 9.5 Nvidia 340 driver pet
https://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/p ... x86_64.pet

If I am remember correctly.
The 340 driver, had several versions, that were tweaks, to improve it.
This is one of them, but it did help others, that needed this 340 driver.

The nouveau driver in Fossapup64 is probably newer than the one in Xenialpup.
By what I have read, it is suppose to be improved.
I think the issue could be it is wanting to do stuff the Nvidia card is not able to support.
Maybe the old card has the feature, but it was not fully implemented or bug fixed.

The Nvidia specific driver, should maybe, clear it all up.

Please report back, your results with the Nvidia 340 driver.

I try to keep up with, what graphics hardware driver, to recommend to people.

There are two Nvidia 340 driver pets for Xenialpup64 7.5 here:
https://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/p ... -xenial64/
Get the bigger sized one.
Well, the smaller one may just have only English language stuff.

[mikewalsh]

Fossapup64 9.5 Nvidia 340 driver pet
https://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/p ... x86_64.pet

@bigpup :-

Ah! Thanks for that, mate. I knew there was a 340 driver .pet available for Xenial64; I wasn't aware Phil had built one for Fossa. I tried building from the .run file, but it just wasn't having it.

O-kay. So; I've now got both Fossa AND Xenial 340 driver .pets. Well, I know what I'll do; I'll set-up test copies of both these on the Latitude, install the driver .pets and see what happens, like.

I'll keep y'all posted.

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

@bigpup :-

Right. Um....good, and....bad.

The good news is that the 340 driver has installed and appears to be working perfectly under Fossapup64. Almost straightaway, I've immediately noticed ONE big improvement; the temps!

Running the nouveau driver, it's been around the 70 c mark. Hotter than I was happy with, truth to tell. Using the 340 driver, it's a much more reasonable mid-50s (about what I get with the GT 710 on the big rig in this same Puppy). I shall need to run for at least a few hours, see if this has helped to clear up the freezing issue.

-------------------------------------------------

With the Xenial64 340 .pet, mixed results. It installs, and everything appears to be working fine.....but nothing is showing in the Nvidia settings panel. Boot manager reports that a ton of display-related stuff has been blacklisted, but I can't make head or tail of whether the nouveau driver has been blacklisted or not.

No settings show up in gKrellM's 'Sensors' panel, either. This would seem to indicate that the nouveau driver HAS been blacklisted, since this one usually reports a single 'nv-core' reading.....and even that is now missing. So; I'm not entirely sure what's happening there.

I've scrubbed the Xenial64 test copy. I'll set up another one, and try with the other 340 driver .pet for Xenial.....see if that works, like.

Will report back.

Mike.

[bigpup]

I think one of those driver pets, was just the driver, and not the other Nvidia software, to control it.
I assume it would be the smaller pet of the two.

I think, the bigger pet, has the full Nvidia driver package, in it.

[mikewalsh]

Mm.

Well, I can report that neither of the 340 driver .pets works with Xenialpup64 on this machine.....despite that they were compiled for it. Both display the same behaviour; everything installs, and a load of stuff is blacklisted, yet.....nothing shows in the control panel, no adjustments can be made.

Yet the same item runs perfectly in Fossapup. I do notice that the Fossapup driver .pet is actually labelled "340.108" - which is the same .run file I've got sitting in my Downloads folder - but both Xenialpup .pets are simply marked "340". So I have to wonder exactly which version of the 340-series driver Phil B. used for these.

I still may try to compile with 'getNvidia'.....and see if that works. Stay tuned!

Mike.

[williams2]

AFAIK, the best way to know which driver X is using, as opposed to which driver it was configured to use, is to look at the bottom of /var/log/Xorg.0.log
For example, my Xorg.0.log file looks like this:

Code: Select all

[  2661.356] (II) RADEON(0): EDID vendor "XXX", prod id 0
[  2661.357] (II) RADEON(0): Using hsync ranges from config file
[  2661.357] (II) RADEON(0): Using vrefresh ranges from config file
[  2661.357] (II) RADEON(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines:

[mikewalsh]

@williams2 :-

Thanks for the info. I shall investigate that at some point.

@bigpup :-

Right! We have SUCCESS.

Using the 64-bit 340.108 .run file & the latest getNvidia 1.5.1 from Shinobar, along with another freshly-done 'copy' of the original Xenial64 install, the kernel module compiled very smoothly, without any fuss.

Just as with the Fossapup one, temps have dropped back to the mid- to high-50s, rather than low- to mid-70s. MUCH better. And everything is now showing correctly in the Nvidia X server settings utility.....and adjustments can be made.

Conclusions? The 340 driver looks as though it's cured the "freezing" issues with Fossapup64 on this Dell Latitude. And the same driver in Xenialpup64 has just made an already good Puppy install even better....

Best thing about doing these is that Google Earth will now run okay in both Pups, since it insists on 'official' drivers with hardware acceleration these days. Runs well, too.

--------------------------------------

So; if anyone else needs the Nvidia 340.108 driver for Xenialpup64, you can find the .pet package here:-

https://mega.nz/folder/nP5DEBBT#aHRs27fWy73ukr0a049DbQ

Perhaps it's just me, but it looks as though we can say that the two available through Xenial64's repo at Ibiblio are NOT really functional..? I also can't say for definite that installing from the provided .pet package will work, since I didn't use it myself - mine was installed direct from the compile, and the .pet package is but a side benefit of using Shinobar's installer utility.

But it's there for anyone who wants to give it a go. Hope it's useful.

Mike.

[wizard]

@mikewalsh

Also, setting the CPU Frequency Scaling Tool to: Power Save helped lower the temperature on my d630.

wizard