dell studio 1749

[oly]

Below are my notes to make this laptop work i will add any new things i discover, thought i would post it for my future reference and others who may purchase this laptop, this is for a lucid but may work for future versions but hopefully will not be needed at all

I bought a dell studio 1749 from dell, i changed out the wireless card for an intel model as the default was broadcom, i am pleased to say this worked out of the box.

First of if you want to keep windows on for duel boot make sure you remove dell data safe backup when your finished with it as it breaks grub on each boot into windows and you will not be able to boot either operating system until you repair grub.

Generally everything works very well, there are a few teaks for better operation however, the first being 3d to get this to work well i had to use the driver from the propietary driver from the ati site.

First remove any fglrx drivers already installed and reboot.

sudo apt-get purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-kernel-source xorg-driver-fglrx-dev

if your laptop boots into safe graphics mode this is great mean the old drivers are gone you can now install the driver from the ati site and reboot and you shoudl get a decent looking desktop back so try something with 3d if it still fails try installing.

sudo apt-get --reinstall install libgl1-mesa-glx xserver-xorg-core

by default the earphone jacks (yes there are two) do not work to fix this edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add the line below.

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6

then reboot and the sockets will work.

One other tweak for some strange reason dell decided to make the laptop function key on by default so f5 (refresh) instead changes your brightness and f2 (rename) switches of your wireless, this can be changed in the bios and put back to the default behaviour.

Hope this is usefull for some one, will add anything else i figure out in the future.

[NightFoxyarrith]

Thanks, this is very helpfull.
I have a question, is installing the ati drivers found on their website better than installing the drivers in the proprietary driver manager in ubuntu? And will this solve the problems I'm having with games under wine because games that seem to work on every computer under wine crash if I enter a big area.

[NightFoxyarrith]

Installing the proprietary ati drivers from the ati site rather then using the ubuntu proprietary driver manager to install them actually solved the problems I was having with wine, thanks for your help man!

[oly]

yeah definitely helps i can also suggest if the games are a bit sluggish or the graphics are glitchy put the shader level in the game to it lowest setting can knock up textures and other settings but ati driver does not seem to like using shaders it certainly helps with starcraft 2 which runs quite nicely on wine on these laptops.

[oly]

Just thought I would add a note to say I tried the hdmi output on this laptop, and the tv came on instantly the only thing I had to do was to switch to hdmi audio in pusle audio to make the sound go through the hdmi port so that's another thing that worked out the box

[sailcappy]

HDMI out is not working. Is there a setting or should this just work?

Thanks!