Installing Ubuntu 7.10 on a Dell 300m (Ubuntu)

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Installing Ubuntu 7.10 on a Dell 300m (Ubuntu)
(2007/12/08)

Installing Ubuntu 7.10 on a Dell 300m
By Brad Trupp (c) 2007

A good indicator of how far along Ubuntu with its Gusty Gibbon release 7.10 has come, and in fact, Linux in general, is how well it works "right out of the box" on different hardware. From my readings over the years, laptops have often been a challenge with their combinations of varying components.

So I was quite surprised how well everything came together when I installed the newest (as of December 2007) Ubuntu.

The Dell Inspiron 300M and the similar Dell Latitude X300 were lightweight (< 3 lbs) laptops that Dell sold around 2003.

There were only two small issues I found and both were easy to remedy.

Repartioning the Hard Drive

The first issue was with repartioning the Hard Drive.

I asked the install to resize the existing NTFS partition for Windows to make room for a new partition.

It came back with errors that it could not rewrite something (I wish I had written down the error since it is now several weeks later).

I also wanted to keep the Dell Utility partition with all the hardware diagnostics.

Solution 1.

I decided not to keep the Windows partition. I have full disk images backed up using Norton Ghost anyway.

To get around this, I rebooted the laptop using the Windows XP CD and went into the command line rescue mode. I simply used the command line command DISKPART to delete the windows partition and then started the install again with the "Use all Free Space" option.

Installed quickly and effortlessly -- and the Dell Utility partition is still there and working correctly.

Wireless was the second issue.

I activated the restricted drivers for the Wireless -- in this case, the Broadcom 43xx chipset family -- and allowed Ubuntu to download the drivers necessary off some repository somewhere.

So almost magically, wireless starts to work - -nearly....

I could see my network -- WPA protected -- and all the networks of my neighbors that were within range but I could not connect to any other of them.

Solution 2.

As usual, I was the architect of my own demise. Solution was to use the correct drivers that my Dell 300m actually used and not the generic ones that Ubuntu found.

I found the drivers on my backups -- BCMWL5.SYS and BCMWL5.INF --and copied them over to the laptop.

After using the Restricted Drivers Manager to uninstall the generic driver and install the correct ones, everything works perfectly.

One Footnote...

After this article was published, someone asked me "How did you get the internal SD card reader working? It doesnt autoload for me.".

Actually that was a small oversite on my part -- I rarely use the SD card reader so I completely forgot about checking if it works.

This article was written using Version 7.04 (April 2007) of Ubuntu.

Things may be different in newer versions.

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