Dell Vostro 3700 Potentially Fedora Specific Issue

LukeWolf · #1 25th October 2010, 06:41 AM

Hello, I've been having issues with trying to get a Dell Vostro 3700 to play nice with Fedora 12, 13, and 14B, problems occur whenever there I try to use the USB, or the webcam, also there are issues when I try to use the proprietary drivers for the broadcom wlan, and for the nvidia gpu (until Nouveau gets proper support where KDE can composite using OpenGL with it and stops tearing images, I'm going to stick with the proprietary drivers for that) or if I have the Bluetooth enabled. I'm tending to think this is a fedora specific issue, because I was able to get Ubuntu to work, although I really really do not want to play with Ubuntu for a number of reasons, I was looking around at other distros but really didn't find one that wasn't mehhy compared to Fedora of the ones that I tried. will post the result of Dmesg in a bit

Edit: Results of Dmesg Without Proprietary wlan or GPU driver http://pastebin.com/i5BeYApf
Edit: Submitted bug Report https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=646317

slackgadget · #2 17th January 2011, 11:11 AM

I've just got a Dell Vostro 3700 and tried installing fedora 14 - 64 bit on it with mixed results. Firstly it installed fine but I had the issue with the broadcom wireless card. I've got the RPM for the the driver and two dependent rpms (on a memory stick for convenience)which I'm pretty profficient at installing now. However, I've also had problems where the USB ports stop working and currently can't get the touchpad to function. I can, however use an external mouse. I booted off the live CD and still the touchpad doesn't work. The only thing I've changed is to upgrade the RAM, but I doubt that that has adversly affected the touchpad.

I might try version 13. What where your reasons for not using Ubuntu? I've not tried it. Like you I'd prefer Fedora. I do a lot of development and most of my target platforms are Redhat/Centos so I'd prefer keeping close to those.

LukeWolf · #3 18th January 2011, 10:33 PM

I wasn't able to keep my Vostro up long enough to have issues with the trackpad, although it seems like I was also having issues on plug events. I did hear somewhere that various DVD drives will have issues so that might be the trouble that we're faced with.

And I have a variety of reasons for not liking Ubuntu, it was the distribution I was on before I came to Fedora. I had always had issues with sound wanting to break on me out of the blue and also there just tended to be problems. In retrospect I believe this has to do with how they handle their upgrade cycles, as they will stick with a release date as opposed to the way Fedora handles things of waiting for all of the major bugs to be fixed before they move on to the next stage of development. Another big issue for me was that Ubuntu is downright Fugly, It used to be browns, but now it's purple mixed with brown, just ugh.. Each time it drove me to retheme the entire system just so that I wouldn't have to look at it. After coming to Fedora I also realized how few security measures Ubuntu takes, they're basically relying entirely on Sudo and to a certain degree AppArmor, they don't have a firewall or otherwise by default. Fedora also actually gives me the tools I need, whereas I'm left searching for them on Ubuntu fruitlessly. For instance I had this one job where we were setting up a terminal server and with Fedora it's quite easy, for Ubuntu the GUI tools are lacking and so you have to go into command line to set it up. All in all Ubuntu is just a hassle.

I wasn't actually able to get Fedora working with the Vostro so after a bit of testing various other distros I settled on openSUSE, as it doesn't confine you down and it like Fedora gives you the tools you need to actually make it work how you want it to, although I still prefer Fedora's way of handling that need.

slackgadget · #4 19th January 2011, 10:49 AM

Totally agree with you. Just tried Ubuntu yesterday. Install went OK but... no root? sudo access? What a pain. I also found myself reaching for the themes in a matter of moments, it is as you say fugly! I did like the way it detected my wireless card and offered to install non-free drivers for me, though.

When I finally found the Skype installs and set it up, the whole thing failed to boot back into the desktop. Having said that it is a Beta and the 64-bit Ubuntu is not recommended. I'm not sure exactly what the issue is here - is there a lack of 64-bit Linux effort? I'm trying a Fedora 14 32-bit install next just for comparrison. If that doesn't give better results then I'll take a look at openSUSE and see where that goes.

Thanks for sharing.

LukeWolf · #5 19th January 2011, 11:52 PM

Well Skype is Skype, heavily undeveloped for anything but Windows. There was supposed to be an open source client in the works but it still hasn't made it out. Here's the latest blog post from November 2009 http://blogs.skype.com/linux/2009/11...en_source.html . So I don't know if it's going to make it out.

If Fedora 14 32bit works for you I might have to try it with a liveCD, even though I would prefer to be running in a 64 bit environment.

Just so you know as far as openSUSE goes kmp == kmod, and there are multiple versions of the kernel although it'll probably give you the desktop version after the update, so you need to install the right variant of the kmod otherwise it won't work with that kernel. I've also put up a feature request for an akmod equivalent but it's going to be a matter of waiting and seeing if they go for it. Oh and wl will be in the packman repository I think it was (it's a simple matter to add repositories, they have this nice set up with all these radiobutton options and you select community repos and it'll give you a list of them.)