Debian Sid on an Dell E5400

First the screen and then the power supply of the Acer 5051AWXMI I've been using for work died some 9 months after the warranty expired. Work said 'Pick a Dell', so I did.

I wanted something not too large but with a screen with plenty of resolution. I picked the E5400 with the WXGA+ display after reading good things about its Linux compatibility.

This time I'm installed Debian Unstable (Sid) from scratch. Or rather installed Debian Stable (currently Lenny) from a CD I had lying around and then upgraded. I need to build some work stuff targetting i386 with GCC 3.3, so for simplicity this is a i386 install, and not x86_64.

So far I'm pretty pleased. Everything I want worked out of the box or with minimal fiddling. The hardware supports kernel modesetting, and that plus the new startup dependencies system means that I'm at a KDM login screen just over 20s after booting.

After the combined niggles of getting my old Acer working, this has been very smooth.

So, what's in the beast?

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 92)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M LPC Interface Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:01.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ba)
02:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 04)
02:01.2 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 21)
02:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev ff)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5761e Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 10)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100

The video is the Intel GM45 integrated graphics chipset. The Xorg intel driver found it and the screen sprang to life in full WXGA+ (1440×900) fig.

I installed the MythTV front end and was immediately able to play video from my backend.

KWin showed compositing disabled. I fiddled around for a bit with the config, then realised I did not have mesa-utils installed. On installing, KWin compositing started up. glxgears gives numbers in the 240FPS region. For the record, the extra items I added to xorg.conf are:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Driver		"intel"
	Option "AccelMethod" "UXA"
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
	Option	"Composite"	"enable"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
	Mode	0666
EndSection

The video and kernel support kernel modesetting, so I enabled it using the instructions on the Debian wiki. With that and the dependency startup in Sid, I get to a KDM login screen a little over 20s after power on.

The Broadcom BCM5761e Ethernet port works fine with the tg3 driver.

I had to install the firmware package firmware-iwlwifi. Since then the built-in Intel Wireless 5100 is working well with the iwl driver.

(I also installed firmware-linux-free and firmware-linux-nonfree packages, just in case.)

Audio is the Intel HDA. So far this has just worked without me needing to do anything. I have yet to try audio capture or the headphone socket.

Initially both seemed to work solidly. Then, sadly, it turned out this was an illusion. Suspend does seem to be reliable. Hibernate mostly works. Mixing the two seems to greatly increases the chances of the system wedging. The Dell BIOS DSDT shows the usual selection of warnings from the Intel compiler.

I've installed uswsusp to give me a little console feedback during suspend and resume. This seems to be OK. I tried adding splashy for some eye candy, but immediately fell found of kernel memory corruption on resume. I suspect this may be an interaction with the kernel modesetting. The modesetting stays, splashy goes.