Couple of hours with an Dell Studio XPS 16 – 2

This post is an extension or/and update to the last Dell Studio XPS 16 experience with Linux Mint which I wrote sometime back.

Hi all,
First of all for those who might be new, I wrote about seeing/using the Dell Studio XPS 16 in the last post here.

First clearing some info. which was misunderstood by few people.

“There are still issues with bluetooth, audio and couple of other things but I’m sure with time and patience all these things can be worked out.”

What I meant was I need to look at those specific issues, see what instructions are there to diagnose what the issue is .

Is the kernel not reading the module (for bluetooth, audio etc.)
or is it something else?

Ideally, the troubleshooting would start at at ruling out some of the
more easier things and then considerably work towards exoctic
workarounds or something .

But of all this can only happen if I have the lappy with me and both he and I have time to look at it as well.

Further along the line , first up this time around is the Public IP and the info. associated with that.

The IP allocated was 125.99.115.215 .

At first glance I thought it was the microsense service as had been given in newspapers before. Looking at the whois record however it turned out to be a Hathway service.

Whois Record

inetnum: 125.99.0.0 – 125.99.255.255
netname: HATHWAY-NET
descr: Hathway IP Over Cable Internet Access Service

This time around we saw four network service providers with two open and two needing some kind of authentication . Didn’t really see what kind of authentication was/is needed as 2 hours just goes like this.

The next thing I did was check out the dmesg . While I will not be dumping the whole dmesg here some of the more interesting facts (from my perspective) would put up here.

[ 0.000000] SMP: Allowing 2 CPUs, 0 hotplug CPUs
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: root=UUID=1a330ddf-8bd0-46a5-84c4-f47af757c540 ro quiet splash
[ 0.000000] Extended CMOS year: 2000
[ 0.004000] Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
[ 0.004000] Memory: 3083520k/3143680k available (4126k kernel code, 55952k reserved, 2208k data, 532k init, 2235660k highmem)
[ 0.004000] CPU: L1 I cache: 32K, L1 D cache: 32K
[ 0.004000] CPU: L2 cache: 3072K
[ 0.004000] CPU: Physical Processor ID: 0
[ 0.004000] CPU: Processor Core ID: 1
[ 0.544779] CPU1: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz stepping 06
[ 0.592950] SCSI subsystem initialized
[ 0.592950] libata version 3.00 loaded.
[ 0.600011] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.13
[ 1.994933] Driver 'sd' needs updating - please use bus_type methods
[ 1.994944] Driver 'sr' needs updating - please use bus_type methods
[ 1.995797] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xfc404000 port 0xfc404100 irq 2298
[ 1.995801] ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xfc404000 port 0xfc404180 irq 2298
[ 1.995804] ata3: DUMMY
[ 1.995805] ata4: DUMMY
[ 1.995808] ata5: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xfc404000 port 0xfc404300 irq 2298
[ 1.995811] ata6: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xfc404000 port 0xfc404380 irq 2298
[ 2.476020] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 2.540337] ata1.00: ATA-8: TOSHIBA MK3254GSYF, LF001D, max UDMA/100
[ 2.540340] ata1.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
[ 2.541145] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
[ 3.428014] ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
[ 3.441773] ata2.00: ATAPI: Optiarc DVD+/-RW AD-7640S, HD16, max UDMA/100
[ 3.455539] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100
[ 3.776015] ata5: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[ 4.096014] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[ 4.096124] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA TOSHIBA MK3254GS LF00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 4.096227] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors: (320 GB/298 GiB)
[ 4.096246] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 4.096248] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 4.096277] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 4.096343] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors: (320 GB/298 GiB)
[ 4.096359] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 4.096362] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 4.096390] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 4.096394] sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4
[ 4.213911] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
[ 4.213959] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[ 4.216279] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM Optiarc DVD+-RW AD-7640S HD16 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 4.221815] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda caddy
[ 4.221819] Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[ 4.221919] sr 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
[ 4.221960] sr 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5
[ 4.295400] BIOS EDD facility v0.16 2004-Jun-25, 0 devices found
[ 4.295401] EDD information not available.
[ 5.057162] eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95784M) rev 5784100 PHY(5784)] (PCI Express) 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet 00:22:19:e0:a7:06
[ 5.171271] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[ 5.171305] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
[ 9.302325] HDA Intel 0000:00:1b.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 22
[ 9.302377] HDA Intel 0000:00:1b.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 9.336491] input: HDA Digital PCBeep as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/input/input9
[ 9.378643] HDA Intel 0000:01:00.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 9.378690] HDA Intel 0000:01:00.1: setting latency timer to 64
[ 9.661529] lp: driver loaded but no devices found
[ 12.894635] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[ 12.894638] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
[ 13.866732] [drm] Initialized radeon 1.29.0 20080528 on minor 0
[ 98.684767] Registered led device: iwl-phy0:radio
[ 98.684814] Registered led device: iwl-phy0:assoc
[ 98.684849] Registered led device: iwl-phy0:RX
[ 98.684883] Registered led device: iwl-phy0:TX


While I will not go into the specifics at this point in time as it would take most of this entry but would re-visit it at a later stretch of time so some things can be poked at.

Also checked out seperately the sound-card.

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: STAC92xx Analog [STAC92xx Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: ATI HDMI [ATI HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

So we know for sure its an HDA Intel device. The other thing we investigated is the sources.list to know what its made of underneath. Here’s the list so far :-

## -----------------------
## LINUX MINT REPOSITORIES
## -----------------------

## +++ Linux Mint 7 Gloria (stable) +++
deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ gloria main upstream import

## +++ Backports (not as stable) +++
#deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ gloria backport

## +++ Community (not as stable) +++
#deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ gloria community

## +++ Romeo (unstable) +++
#deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ gloria romeo

## +++ Source Repositories +++
#deb-src http://packages.linuxmint.com/ gloria main upstream import
#deb-src http://packages.linuxmint.com/ gloria community
#deb-src http://packages.linuxmint.com/ gloria backport
#deb-src http://packages.linuxmint.com/ gloria romeo

## -------------------
## UBUNTU REPOSITORIES
## -------------------

## +++ Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty (stable) +++
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-security main restricted universe multiverse

## +++ Backports & Proposed (not as stable) +++
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-backports main restricted universe multiverse
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-proposed main restricted universe multiverse

## +++ Source Repositories +++
#deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty main restricted universe multiverse
#deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-updates main restricted universe multiverse
#deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-security main restricted universe multiverse
#deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-backports main restricted universe multiverse
#deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-proposed main restricted universe multiverse

## ------------------
## OTHER REPOSITORIES
## ------------------

## +++ Canonical (stable) +++
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ jaunty partner

## +++ Medibuntu (stable) +++
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ jaunty free non-free

So from the above list it becomes clear that linux mint does have some repos. Most probably for the MintUpdate tools/services it provides. While we are not using those services atm, its good to know that they’re there.

Just to give some shakes to the card, we also did a preliminary GTKperf run on the machine just for fun and here are the results.

GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Sun Sep 13 18:51:42 2009

GtkEntry - time: 0.00
GtkComboBox - time: 0.07
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.04
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.02
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.01
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.03
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.02
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.01
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.00
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.01
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.09
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.13
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.09
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.04
---
Total time: 0.58


I know its not much, but its just a foundation I’m doing at the moment. I hope to do some more testing in the days and weeks ahead.

I also hope to do some benchmarking of the machine as well.

Let’s see how things churn. Signing of at the moment.