Here are some notes from running Linux on the Dell Latitude CPX H500GT laptop. (First, note that this laptop may be identified as "PPX" on the back, but is named with "H500GT" in the boot screen and BIOS.)

Having maintained this laptop for a couple years, I can't recommend it. We're on the fourth keyboard, the CD sometimes falls out of the bay, the trackpad causes the mouse to drift, and the suspend feature has been unreliable. If you are looking for a cheap laptop to run Linux on, I highly recommend IBM Thinkpads. I'm look forward to replacing this one soon!

You are probably interested in one of these sections in a particular:

• Installing Mandrake 10.0
• Upgrading from Mandrake 10.0 to 10.1
• Upgrading from Mandrake 10.1 to 2005
• Upgrading from Mandriva 2005 to 2006

Installing Mandrake 10.0

The installation process of Mandrake 10.0 Official was flawless. All of the hardware was correctly detected.

I was impressed that most of the special "laptop keys" immediately worked withouth additional configuration. This seemed to be because they talk directly to the Dell BIOS. Even "suspend" worked out of the box. The volume and mute keys did not work immediately. This page has some notes about how to get those working if you care. (So far, I don't care).

Addressing Quirks

USB Support

The 2.6.3 kernel did not seem to be able to use the USB port at all. This is a little surprising, since I use Mandrake 10.0 with the same kernel on other machines and do not have the problem. I wouldn't be surprised if the current 2.6.x kernel versions have already fixed this.

The work-around is simple: Use the 2.4 kernel instead. There is a sneaky way to select this during the installation process: Select the "LSB" software group, for the Linux Standards Base. A dialog will pop-up telling you that it requires the 2.4 kernel, and will ask you if you want to use it instead.

The 2.4 kernel provided worked find with the USB ethernet adaptor and USB printer. It froze when a USB flash drive was connected. (I've seen this happen on other Mandrake 9.2 installations). Since there isn't a need to use USB flash drives with the laptop, this is OK to do without for now. I suspect that soon a 2.6 kernel will be out that provides complete USB support.

Thankfully, Mandrake makes it rather easy to switch between 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.

Better Power Management Support

As I mentioned, the "suspend" key worked immediately. A key is also provided to check the battery status, which also worked. (It accesses some kind of BIOS screen). However, I found that networking wasn't being restored when resuming. There was an easy fix for this as well. Simply install the apmd and kdeutils-common packages.

The latter contains the "Klaptop" control panel module. It enables the helpful system-tray battery monitor tool. Find it under the "Power Control" KDE Control Panel to configure it. With the combination of these installed, networking was properly restored upon resume.

Unfortunately, after I did this I noticed the 'restore' was not happening reliably. This workaround consistently worked for me: First, I disabled all of the automatic suspend features in Klaptop and the BIOS. To suspend, press "Control-Alt-F1" before pressing the suspend key. Restore will now work and will return you directly to the graphical interface.

From what I could tell, the suspend script that was installed was supposed to be switching to a text terminal automatically. Perhaps it was not recieving this signal in time from apmd for some reason. There is probably a way to make it work perfectly, but this was "good enough" for me for now.

Networking

We are using the Linksys USB100M USB-to-Ethernet adapter with it. It was detected automatically by Mandrake and needed no special configuration. So far, it's "felt" as fast other ethernet adapters I've used. It certainly seems "fast enough", anyway.

Upgrading to Mandrakelinux 10.1

I put off upgrading this laptop to 10.1 for months after it was released, because 10.0 was running fine. I finally upgraded so the Scribus 1.2.1 package would install easily.

Here are some notes on how my experience went when upgrading this laptop to Mandrakelinux 10.1.

Running the upgrade discs was totally easy and without incident.

Updating Lilo.conf

I did find a problem when I rebooted afterwards. :) Just after entering the graphical part of the boot process, the screen would go totally black and hard disk activity would stop. I found a note in the Errata which addressed this. It appears that my "lilo.conf" was not modified during the upgrade, perhaps because I has customized some by hand before. I manually adjusted it and then ran lilo -v to put the settings into affect. In retrospect, I could have probably used Mandrake's graphical configuration tool at the end up the upgrade if I had thought to do it then. Here's how I adjusted it after the fact: First, I had to get a working console. I knew that I do this if I pressedd Alt-F1 Control-Alt-F1 during the boot process. So as boot process approached the graphical phase, I pressed these key sequences repeatedly, which did produce a console login for me. Then, following the tips in the errata above anad the examples in the file, I added a new entry for the 2.6.8 kernel and made it the default. After that my "udev/devfs" problem was fixed, and the system booted normally.

Package updates

Once the new desktop was up, I immediately ran "MandrakeUpdate" to install packages updated since the official release. This amounted to 151 updated packages, comprising 358 Megs of updates! This process ran without intervention, except asking me about how I wanted to merge some config files at end.

Quirks from 10.0: USB and Suspend working properly

I tested USB with an external USB hard drive, and it worked fine, appearing on the desktop quickly.

I used Klaptop to "enable the ACPI helper tool" and set it to suspend when the lid is closed. This worked fine for four tests in a row. Once I had to re-suspend and resume to get the screen to come back. No big deal. I'm very pleased this is working now.

New Quirks for 10.1

I ran into some minor quirks with 10.1 that I suspect wouldn't be a problem with a fresh install.

The battery status icon had disappeared from the dock. Installing the current version of kdeutils-klaptop and rebooting fixed that.

Some of the folder icons in the menu system because generic folder icons. I elected not to try to address this.

In Konqueror, Control-L had become mapped to two different things. I used Settings: Configue Shortcuts to turn off "Clear Location Bar" as a shortcut.

Upgrading to Mandriva 2005 LE

I put off upgrading to Mandriva 2005 as long as I felt I could, because 10.1 was working well enough. There were a couple of features that made me consider it worthwhile. In 2005LE, "NetApplet" gains a feature to easily switch from one networking profile to another. This would be very useful with switching from our home networking setup to a public wifi profile.

Related, Mandriva added a new system utility to detect and connect to wireless networks, and integrated this with their other networking utilities.

Sound

I noticed and was able to address a sound problem with Mandriva 2005 that may well have been there all along. Certain high pitches would sound very "tweetie" like broken or cheap speakers. In fact, my first check was to try different speakers, which had different results. What worked was to switch to the alternate sound card driver Mandriva provides, which can be done like this:

1. In the Mandriva Control Center, Select Hardware and then Sound (Or just press ALT-F2 and directly run kdesu draksound). Switch the driver to "snd-es1968". This implies a switch from using "ALSA" to "OSS", which are different sound processing backends.
2. I found I needed to now disable the ALSA service, or the computer would hang when it boots. To do that, visit "Services" in the Mandriva Control Center, and uncheck the "on boot" option for "alsa". (The shortcut to the Services tool is ALT-F2 and kdesu drakxservices).
3. Finally, I updated the KDE preferences to use OSS explicitly. (I'm not sure if this was necessary). That's found under "System: Configuration: Configure your Desktop: Sound: Sound System: Hardware Select the Audio Device". I changed "Auto-detect" to "Open Sound System"

Quirks for 2005LE

Sound quit working after suspend. I eventually fixed this by switching the power management from ACPI back to APM. Once done, sound worked great after suspend, but it was necessary to do the keystroke dance again to initiate a successful suspend: Ctrl-Alt-Ft, Fn-Suspend.

Here's how I switched back to APM:

• Using the "Services" control panel, I turned off the ACPI items, and turned on the APM service, setting it to start at boot.
• In /etc/lilo.conf I added this to the 'append' line for the current kernel: acpi=off apm=on. Running lilo -v makes that takes effect. (There's probably a way to do this step through Mandriva's graphical "Boot" control panel. )
• After rebooting, I had to right-click on the Klaptop tray icon, go to newly appearing APM tab, and click the button the enable the "helper" applications.

Upgrading from Mandriva 2005 to 2006

I performed an unorthodox upgrade to 2006 using a Mandriva One 2006 install/liveCD. This disc is made for installs and not upgrades. I don't recommend using it for an upgrade.

Once Mandriva 2006 was installed, the Alps touchpad began behaving poorly it would constantly register clicks when touched, or move itself into the corner and not come out any more. (No kidding!). I suspected the hardware might be dying, but the touchpad worked fine when booted from a Damn Small Linux liveCD, and it hard worked fine with Mandriva 2005. So something about Mandriva 2006 didn't agree with this hardware.

In desperation, I tried install an alpha version Kubuntu dapper drake. It had basically the same problems. In researching this, I found lots of people had problems with Alps touchpads and Linux, across several different distributions and brands of laptops.

Frustrated one more by a hardware-related issue with this laptop, it was finally replaced by a used Thinkpad T22, which I heartily recommend instead. Like this Dell laptop, the Thinkpad was found on E-bay for about $300, although it was definitely an upgrade. As a bonus, we were able to use the wireless card and memory upgrade bought for the Dell in the new Thinkpad.

I doubt I would buy or recommend a Dell laptop in the future. The other person I know using Linux on a Dell laptop had a new Inspiron. He also "upgraded" to an IBM Thinkpad.

I hope this page has been helpful. Now that the Dell Latitude is not being used, I wouldn't be maintaining it anymore.