Dell Latitude 120L Experience?
 

Linux Laptops only lists the 110L...

I am going to ITT technical school (anyone wana hire a net-admin/helpdesk in Sacramento CA?) and I have the option
of getting a Dell Latitude 120L, and If I do I will want to dualboot
linux (I will have some courses about linux)

I am trying to figure out if I want to go ahead and get it.. It's the
only one the school offers. If I want to use my student loan to get a
new laptop this one **has** to be the one.

Do I want to spend an extra $1,239.13 on it? (I guess I can get it cheaper elsewhere, but I can't afford it out of pocket.)

Proposed Dist: Fedora3

heres a cheap one on sale. cus for 1300 you can get a whole lot more than that dell. this one has simiular specs 6-700 bucks cheaper.

http://h71016.www7.hp.com/html/nx611...s/nx6110/345IS
i even think this is the one they are going to offer w/ Suse/SLED 10

yup it's cheaper... but I have been told I can't apply my student loans to another machine, only the one they supply. Any other I would have to
buy out of pocket.

well then i would say no. $1300? not for a celeron. Is this a dell loan? don't they give you the money or does it go to the bookstore direct. you could do better saving up a few hundred and do a used one on ebay.(i got an IBM that way. it was great. a corporate, decomissioned unit from a reseller.)

other than that i can see it having no probs. with the dualboot.

Checking back again..
 

Well I did sign up for the laptop. I was sure to ask, the loan goes to the school it's own book store. I can't take any of the money myself and get a better laptop.

Linux on Laptops only shows articles for the Dell Latitude 110L, which has some differences...

Here's what I know:
Intel Pentium M 740 (1.73Ghz), wxga display (what chip?) 512 shared (ugh) 533mHz DDR2 memory, 40gb HD, 56KV.92 modem, CDRW&8xDVD, Dell Wireless 1370 WLAN (80211 b/g)

It'l come with XP Pro, (which I will need to keep because 90% of my classes center around that)

I now have Fedora 5 to install.

The one Linux on Laptops article was Gentoo based and the author had to jump through hoops for the wireless and for the display. I don't even know if He dual booted.

Anyone out there already running Linux on one of these? (heh! anyone out there currently enrolled at ITT?? c'mon 80 locations, someone?)

If you have to make hardware setting changes, it may effect the way XP Pro works... ugh.

I am also going to ITT in Washington. I have gotten the same laptop and it being nothing spectacular it gets the job done... (for school). I am running dual boot with Ubuntu with Windows. I have previously ran with Windows/Suse 10.1. This laptop is good for school and maybe some old games... but it runs Linux quite well.

s'up ZKriz!
 

Hi,

Well, how did the install go? The two things that would be most important to me would be display and wifi/ethernet and modem.

Were you able to get full resolution on the laptop LCD?

Were you able to use the Wifi? Especially on the campus encrypted network? Were you able to get the internal ethernet working ok?

Were you able to get the modem working in linux? (I dial up at home ugh!)

Ron.

The resolution works great with Ubuntu. The ethernet/wifi is giving me trouble and I don't use the modem so I dunno about that.

Ethernet has been giving me the most trouble... I've been trying to read and learn as much as I can about all this information to help fix the problem that it gives. Also I havn't tried useing it at school yet since I can't even get wireless to work at home. The internal ethernet was also giving me some trouble... although I havn't given that much time to troubleshoot it. I will give more itme to it and try to get it working soon.

On the other hand SUSE 10.1 was giving me a lot of trouble especially the display... I couldn't even force it to do what I wanted it to. So I resorted to Ubuntu, nothing wrong with it, I just like SUSE better.

Would you guys know where to get some information to get my wireless working? Below is my wireless card... I have been searching and have gotten some information from another user... h t t p : / / w w w . u b u n t u f o r u m s . o r g / s h o w thread.php?t=197102&highlight=HOWTO%3A+Broadcom+4318+Wireless+Cards just wondering if someone else has any other good resources... Thanks!

Dell Wireless 1370 WLAN Mini-PCI Card - Broadcom

Aaron

What is the problem?
 

What is going on?

If you run ifconfig as root do you see eth0? (is the ethernet hardware detected?)

What does your home network look like?

I was thinking of running Fedora 5, have you tried that?

What did you do to re-partition or are you only running live CD's?

Ron.

I havn't tried running Fedora but I have looked at and considered it. But I do want to get one Linux flavor working and stick with it a while. That would allow me to get familiar with it and learn more about BASH.

But my home network is simple:

DSL Modem --> D-Link Wireless router
--> (Physical) Computer 1
--> (Physical) Computer 2
--> Wireless Conn 1 (Computer)
--> Wireless Conn 2 (Laptop)temp conn.
--> Wireless Conn 3 (Nin. DS)temp conn.

No live CD, (lol), I have it dual booting on the HD. Ubuntu has about 16GB space, with a 2GB swap, and Windows has the rest (apprx. 20GB).

It may be a miss communication but by that quote I meant to say "wireless." I believe the physicall ethernet connection worked but I don't want to say for sure because I don't remember. I'm at work now so I can't test it. I should be able to test it later tonight.

Thanks,
Aaron

Edit: I really don't have any use for the physciall ethernet connection so I'm not too worried about that. I am trying to get the wireless working though because that is what I primarily use with that laptop unless I have to resort to the physicall connection.

I go to ITT in getzville, ny....

i have the 110L model laptop running XP Pro and Suse 10.1 on a dual boot.... honestly, this thing runs linux better than windows.... except for the wifi part :(

Installation was cake, partitioning can be done from the install disk. Ethernet worked imediately. Display gives me 1024x768 res. My partitions are almost the exact same as Zkirz's. The wifi driver is not being recognized by suse, i am trying a bunch of ways to get around that problem... and the only other issue i noticed was that i can no longer tap my trackpad to make a mouse click while in XP, though it does work in linux still.... i probly just need to reinstall the driver in windows.

I got my laptop for the same reason as you, no money out of pocket.... if they let me, i plan to get another one next quarter since this thing is from january and i want something a lil newer. My suggestion is to get the dell, it works great in school and for most everyday tasks, i only run into an issue when i try rendering large 3d animations (cause it takes a while), or running the newest pc games (cause there is no dedicated graphics card). otherwise its great. the components are matched well and its a fine tuned model. dell laptops are quality (but pricey), its the desktops they make that suck...

Tuesday!, Tuesday!, Tuesday!
 

(end echoie annoucer voice)

S'up Elvenson!

Yay!

They start handing out the laptops on Tuesday.. They are already stacked up in the bookstore (leaving very little room for bookstore employees!)

Ok, I have been racking my brain. It's a little thing but it's important to me. The naming of the machine. (hostname). My Toshiba Satellite is named "sputnik", my thinkpad is named "Think" (after the IBM slogan from the 19(50s?)) My Apple iBook is named "Johnny" (appleseed)

What's a good name for a DELL?
And no, I don't want to name it after the "Duuude youre getting a Dell" guy. :^)

There goes another BIG chunk of my student loan.

just name it "Dood", unless you can find that kids name someplace, then ya should use that

Got my wireless working great just needed a little tweaking, some restarts, and then some more tweaking. When working with the wireless it is very picky on how it is done, if you run into problems write out exactly how you are doing it and review what you have done. Change one step try it again and see how it goes. Hard to tell people exactly how to do it when there are a lot of steps that have to be followed directly. Only problem I'm having now is at my home with WEP encryption... otherwise it works great at school and w/out any encryption.

elvenson: Yea, I know what you mean by it runs better in Linux... Actually I'm going to try and dump windows all together and run Windows on WINE in Linux, but we'll see how that works out.

How is Windows on WINE compared to the real thing? I never tried it before.... wondering if its really able to get the job done or if its another of those extremely slow and half featured emulations...