Michael and Sridhar, thanks for your posts. Sridhar, I'm a complete laptop n00b but I wanted to ask you if your cores are on 46% or ~1MHz when idling (my spec is 2.13MHz cores)? And have you noticed any heat issues (in comparison to windows)? I went for a meaty graphics card but now I'm wondering if this may be a problem in future. It feels like the system runs hotter in linux than in windows which is a concern.
------------------------------- Separately, for the benefit of anyone taking the plunge with dell, here is what I did ( I'll exclude things like defragmenting and having a boot cd with qt_parted to do the partitioning etc): I ended up putting ubuntu 6.10 on the 3rd primary partition of my dell inspiron 9400. I installed grub to the boot sector of this partition and not the MBR - you have to be pretty careful about how you tell the ubuntu 6.10 desktop installer to do this, there is just one text box where you type in the grub location and by default it is the mbr so you have to override it using grub notation (you should probably also opt for manual partitioning when the installer asks to ensure you have the choice). The dell MBR remains preserved. It's not too bad actually: all it does is select the active partition and invokes its bootloader. Having made the 3rd partition active (using a sysrescue cd) with grub in the boot sector, the dell MBR invokes grub. Grub in turn can boot ubuntu or win XP on the second partition. The dell utility partition remains intact as the first partition; and I can view its contents in gnome. The installer program tried to re-format it because it thought it was damaged FAT16 but I stopped it from doing this. I was just not brave enough to mess with the HPA at the end of the disk. A word of caution: if you press the media direct button, it will boot mediadirect (I think this requires the dell mbr), which includes messing with your partition table to make the hpa visible. When you log out of md it un-messes with it, but it will make the second partition active, so you won't see grub next time you boot, you'll just get windows. Solution is to either make the 3rd partition active again or maybe configure the windows bootloader - I've opted for the former. I also removed the recovery or DSR partition; dell provide a utility which you can run from windows to do this. Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
