Ubuntu on my Dell XPS M1330 - Booted with the MediaDirect button

October 9th, 2008 Roshan

So when my motherboard was replaced, MediaDirect stopped starting up, so there was no Media to be had from the button, Direct or otherwise and the button itself booted Vista and then started the MediaDirect application. Thinking I had a brilliant idea, I set out to see if I could boot Ubuntu using the MediaDirect button and Vista using the Power button, only to find that hundreds of other people have done that before to.

However none of those guides worked because I simply couldn’t manage to install GRUB to the extended partition due to many many errors. Finally, I deleted MediaDirect, installed Ubuntu in a couple of logical partitions and went back to using Windows. Then today, I decided to finish the job, and with LiveCD in hand proceeded to fight the demons of distro installation under esoteric conditions. GRUB kept failing trying to find stage1 and stage2 files, and no matter how many tricks I tried, none of them worked. Until I discovered this lovely parameter to grub-install.

So with GRUB already installed on the logical partition (as part of the Ubuntu installation process), I just had to point grub-install to the right place to get all the files from:
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/disk-1/ /dev/sda4
and boom! I had a bootloader on the extended partition.

The best part is that I’d already installed the Dell bootloader (the one that handles the difference between MediaDirect and Power) configured to look at the third and fourth partitions and so I shut down and hit the MediaDirect button and then much happiness ensued. At least until I saw how fonts looked in Firefox :)

The command to run from the Dell MediaDirect disc is:
rmbr.exe dell 3 4
Remember to start cmd.exe with Administrator permissions (right click, Run as Administrator). The only problem is that ‘Restart’ always means ‘Restart into Windows’.

To get proper instructions on how to do this instead of this garbled mess, here are the links I found most useful:
Using the Media Direct button to boot Ubuntu
Another thread for that
The thread where I found out about --root-directory

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XPS Dellivered

April 18th, 2008 Roshan

A while ago, I was considering buying an HP laptop while grumbling about how hard it would be to carry around. Soon after that, I ordered a Dell XPS M1330 because for the size there just didn’t seem to be anything in the range that would get you discrete graphics at that price. In any case, they delivered it today, some 4 days outside the 8 business day promise they gave and some two weeks after the date originally on their website (8th April).

Roshan George’s XPS M1330 Thumbnail

I’m real happy with what I got. Vista isn’t very good, there are times when even 3GB of RAM and the GeForce 8400M GS make the closing animation sluggish when running only one or two programs. That and I hate the way the screen flickers dark when UAC comes up. That flicker is really annoying. But over all, everything looks great, the screen is bright and clear and Vista’s font smoothing is really nice. The laptop itself is nice and light and has enough ports for me to be happy :)

My changes to the base model:

  • An upgrade to the T8300 2.4Ghz processor. It was cheap.
  • An upgrade (in my view) to a 7200 rpm hard drive that stores 80GB less.
  • Discrete Graphics: 128 MB GeForce 8400M GS. It also does that shared memory thing.
  • The Intel 4965 AGN wireless card.

Maybe I should’ve chosen an extra gigabyte of RAM instead of the processor. Nevermind, it should be easy to do, and I remember I used to get along just fine with just 1GB on my previous laptop. Still, the one thing I really miss getting is the WLED screen that everybody’s just raving about. Maybe in a few years :)

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Window Shopping for Laptops

March 22nd, 2008 Roshan

I’ve been looking for a laptop and so I’ve been poking around on HP’s site. I chose HP because the HP Compaq NX 7300 I have has near mythical Linux compatibility, everything here works better than it does on the pre-installed XP and with no effort whatsoever.
This is what the dv9700t’s look like:

I’m not the fashion conscious kind, but this looks pretty reasonable anyway. Unfortunately, while I can get a 14.4″ laptop it comes to much more with either the same specifications or much less and powered much lower. Hopefully, I’ll be able to buy one of those cheap UMPCs that are becoming so popular, so I won’t need to lug this giant around if I do buy it. What struck me the most was that it costs so much more for inferior hardware here in India. That dv9700t laptop comes with Windows Vista, an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100, 17″ wide-screen, 3GB RAM, a 512 MB nVidia GeForce 8600M GS, Intel 4965AGN, 250GB drive, LightScribe DVD±RW DL. All that comes to slightly less than 50,100 rupees. I can’t even get the same configuration here, and if I tried I’d be priced out of my head.

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The Asus EEE PC

February 19th, 2008 Roshan

My dad was asking me about the, now famous, Asus Eee PC. Apparently he thinks that such a cheap lightweight laptop would really be just what he needs. We did the usual play around with me trying to convince him that what would be awesome and absolutely necessary would be me having both the Eee PC to carry to college with me and the Compaq NX 7300 to actually do my work on. The only that seems to be stopping him from getting on with it is the fact that he wants to connect the damn thing to projectors and have it just work, it seems to have a VGA output but I’m not too sure how good that is at actually doing stuff because I haven’t had a purely great experience with dual monitors and I can imagine this is similar.

In any case, he’s decided to wait and see, and probably eventually purchase either that or some other laptop in that price range and with similar specifications — I don’t need more than 8 GB, that’s enough for me.. Of course if it’s going to cost more than Rs.19,000 for the top end model it ceases to be worthwhile because you can get a full fledged laptop with an AMD processor for around 10,000 rupees more than that fully legit. I’m eager that he get the Eee PC and have a good experience because it’s a Linux device, but you know, if he can’t use it then there’s no point.

Elsewhere, a friend posted about HCL’s new laptops, news that showed up in The Hindu a week or so ago. There, he claims that he’d buy the Eee PC if it cost around Rs. 8,000. See, I know they make money off the stuff, but Rs. 8,000 seems like way too little in production costs. I claimed that you can’t find a desktop PC with the Eee PC specs for that much. Let’s see if I’m right:

  • 1 GB DDR2 RAM - Rs. 1,200
  • 8 GB SSD - Rs. 3,500
  • Wireless 802.11b - Rs. 1,000
  • Intel Celeron-M processor - Rs. 3,000

So there, that’s taking lower estimates, and without a motherboard even, or any of the rest of the features, and some essentials. Perhaps the friend would be better off with a Sony PRS 505 or one of those new Panasonic Ebook readers.

Prices are from newegg when I couldn’t find Indian prices (newegg is usually cheaper)

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