Dell Latitude 6410 on Ubuntu 10.10

0. About the hardware
* lspci -v
* other peripherials, such as SD card reader, smart card reader, connectors of all kind (firewire, hdmi, etc), fingerprint reader, ...

1. Booting the installer fails as soon as it reaches graphics mode. It only shows blank screen. The solution was booting with "nomodeset" option at the boot loader, which resulted in booting to 800x600 mode. It was enough to install the base system and enable the proprietary nvidia driver. After that it came up to the normal resolution 1440x900.

Just a side note to this point: after switching to nvidia, the following message appeared:

failed to get i915 symbols, graphics turbo disabled

I haven't experienced problems with the video yet, so at the moment I'm fine with it probably being fixed in 2.6.36.

2. Sound. At first, the laptop did have sound. Then it became muted, though the volume knobs seemed to be working. After switching master channel from 'High Definition Audio Controller Digital Stereo (HDMI)' to 'Internal Audio Analog Stereo' in KMix, it came alive again. No idea about the former though.

3. SD Card. After I inserted the card to the reader, I got nothing but several log lines in /var/log/messages:

mmc0: ADMA error
mmc0: Got data interrupt 0x02000000 even though no data o
sdhci: Power:    0x0000000f | Blk gap:  0x00000000
sdhci: Wake-up:  0x00000000 | Clock:    0x00004007
sdhci: Timeout:  0x0000000a | Int stat: 0x00000000
sdhci: Int enab: 0x02ff00cb | Sig enab: 0x02ff00cb
sdhci: AC12 err: 0x00000000 | Slot int: 0x00000000
sdhci: Caps:     0x21e832b2 | Max curr: 0x00000040
sdhci: ADMA Err: 0x00000001 | ADMA Ptr: 0x00efda1c
sdhci: ===========================================
mmc0: error -5 whilst initialising SD card

Following comment #7 in this bugreport, I've managed to work around this, by placing the referenced file at /etc/modprobe.d/latitude-reader.conf, and re-inserting sdhci-pci module.

4. Alt-SysRq. Unlike my previous Dell, magic SysRq commands need F10 (SysRq) button to be pressed with holding both Alt and the Fn key down, but at the next letter the Fn key must be released. So the exact sequence for forced rebooting is Fn-Alt-F10,Alt-b. However, it wasn't helping me at freezes after suspend or hibernation, doh!

To be continued... the following things still do not work
* suspend, hibernation (dies horribly)
* touchpad scrolling (I've patched psmouse and now I can change some of the parameters in systemsettings, but it seems to have no affect on scrolling)
* middle button handling is not done in the way I prefer
* load is constantly above 1, therefore battery lifetime is poor (haven't been using enough for more exact data)

The following things are working (yeah, the year of Linux Desktop is approaching)
* WLAN (WPA2-Enterprise)
* backlight switch in the keyboard (though it seems to be independent from the OS)
* docking station
* webcam
* desktop effects

Haven't tested yet (but I'm eager to)
* various external monitor outputs
* firewire
* Huawei 3G usb stick

EPISODE 2.

5. Lots of 'NVRM: os_raise_smp_barrier(), invalid context!' messages in syslog. Upgrading to the latest nvidia driver (260.19.12-0ubuntu1~xup2 from x-swat ppa) solved it.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install nvidia-settings nvidia-current nvidia-current-modaliases

6. Suspend problems. Inserting "acpi_sleep=nonvs" to the Grub command line seems to solve it. The other option would be to upgrade to 2.6.36 kernel, but I'm a bit reluctant to do it, I prefer the distro kernels. However, given the number of problems I'm still having, I might give it a try later.
I've tried suspend several times and the machine was able to resume. One time it didn't ask for the password on resume, but it doesn't seem to be reproducible.

add GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_sleep=nonvs" to /etc/default/grub, then
sudo update-grub

I've tried to disable SpeedStep in BIOS as recommended in #578673, but it resulted in very frequent 'MCP power or thermal limit exceeded' messages in /var/log/syslog. Being on SpeedStep enabled, I haven't experienced resume failures yet.
Strangely enough, I'm still unable to go down to hibernation (suspend to disk), the machine did not remove power. I was able to switch to vty1 and use SysRq commands to reboot, but nothing else worked (eg. CapsLock). As I normally do not use this, I can live without it, just embarrassing.

Vortsetzung folgt / To be continued / Folytatása következik.