Dell Studio 1555

Introduction
This page contains information about Dell Studio 1555. It is a copy-and-paste-and-modify from the similar article about the 1535 model. It's not a full tutorial for installing gentoo on this machine. To write that, I suspect I should build a new system from the ground and I'm afraid I haven't enough time at the moment. As such, this page will be useful to users with a certain degree of expertise, which I believe should fit the average gentoo user.

Hardware specific notes
These are the output of cpuinfo, lspci -nnk and lsusb.

The 1555 series may be shipped with different CPUs. Mine has a P8600.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

This processor supports hardware virtualization (Intel-VT) which gives a noticable speedups at least in KVM or Virtualbox.

lspci -k

lsusb

Video
With regards to the Italian market, this notebook is usually sold with a 15,4" wide LCD glare-type panel which supports 1366x768 resolution but some variants there exist that are shipped with different configurations.

The laptop has a dedicated AMD Radeon Mobility HD4570 with 512 MB video card or more. It works with the proprietary ati-drivers (flgrx), which is great for graphics effects, especially in compiz and kwin. Choose a graphics driver from those available for your card and follow the linked guide.

Framebuffer
I don't like using framebuffer but you should have no problem configuring it, so maybe I'm adding some hints in the future about this and fbsplash. However, vesafb-tng should work, since it's OK for the HD3450 model, which supports 1024x768 resoultion on the framebuffer console.

Follow Framebuffer for details.

Sound
Something troubling about this laptop is that it looks like it had two sound cards. The first one is an Intel HDA compatible card that should work with kernel drivers, but it doesn't, at least not out of the box in older kernels (circa 2.6.31). If that is the case, after compiling EVERYTHING related to alsa as a module and running alsaconf, you'll have to add these lines:

/etc/modprobe.conf

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf

The other one is built into the VGA device and is useful if you are going to use the HDMI output connector. You might have some trouble to get microphones working.

Webcam
The webcam is a uvc compatible webcam, it's supported by linux. The webcam is working just fine. It also works perfectly with Skype. You just need compile with generic support for video for linux (version 2 + compatibility layer for version 1) and uvc. To test it, compile mplayer with the v4l2 USE flag, load the appropriate kernel modules and run $ mplayer tv:// /dev/video Alternatively, you can unmask guvcview, which is a user-friendly windows-like gtk tool that somebody might like.

Wired
Wired network is working out of the box with tg3 (Tigon 3) bundled kernel module.

Wireless
The laptop has a "Intel (R) Wireless WiFi Link 5100/5300" which, depending on the version of the drivers database, can or cannot be correcly identified. Anyway, you'll have to compile the proper kernel modules for Intel Wifi. Then you'll have to install the corresponding microcode by issuing:

If you are deploying a kernel before 2.6.30, you have to mask all microcode packages after and including version 8.24.2.12.

/etc/portage/package.mask

Just remember to remove this line on kernel upgrade.

Note if are experiencing authentication problems with WPA-EAP, consider disabling both gnutls and ssl USE flags in wpa_supplicant. There is an implementation of SSL/TLS bundled with wpa_supplicant which is not the state of the art but should work (wireless stuff is always a mess).

Bluetooth
There are variants sold with integrated bluetooth. Mine wasn't, so...

Card readers
There is nothing special here. Works out of the box if you load the necessary modules. (sdhci-pci, mmc_core, etc.)

ACPI
Suspension and hibernation are OK with tuxonice-sources but, depending on the version of the kernel, other parts of the acpi system might NOT work! I'm experiencing a lot of strange effects when it comes to the RF-Kill switch, power management, the Intel VT feature and the kernel options that control how special keys/function keys are mapped. It looks like Windows Vista goes wild with these features when powering off and changes them: e.g., sometimes the Intel VT feature is disabled for no reason. Also, I believe there's a bug in either the linux kernel drivers or the intel microcode; sometimes I have to reboot before I can actually use the wireless adapter in Linux, otherwise it keeps complaining in dmesg that the HW RF-Kill switch is off and it won't work. Too bad this lapton doesn't have a HW switch! Most of the times you can bring the interface up without rebooting using the rfkill utility, which is probably masked by some ~x86 or ~amd64 keyword. Unmask it and:

The acpi driver itself looks buggy and after a while might crash saying "input buffer is not empty, aborting transaction" in syslog or dmesg. After that, the kernel won't be able do to anything related to power management anymore, not even detecting if you're on battery or not. This is a well known problem for this laptop.

Update on 01.01.2010 by Akeiron: WARNING ABOUT Kernel >=2.6.32 The last kernel known to work flawlessly with this laptop is some 2.6.31. The problem with the acpi ec driver SEEMS gone, and it is unless you suspend and then resume with NO battery. There is no message whatsoever but the fan control doesn't work anymore so the CPU overheats and the system is shutting down eventually. I tested this with gentoo-sources, tuxonice-sources and vanilla-sources. There are problems in other distros, too. If the battery is present, then everything works like charm with kernel 2.6.35. I guess some script tweaking can solve the problem, but no clues so far.

The tweak that follows is the very, VERY DIRTY way to patch the kernel sources up to and including 2.6.31. You might employ it temporarily AT YOUR RISK. Open the following file with an editor, search for this text: "aborting transaction" which is unique in the file. Then uncomment the goto line and recompile the kernel.

/usr/src/linux/drivers/acpi/ec.c

You can find people struggling with Dell Studio 1555, ACPI, and kernel on different distros (gentoo, ubuntu, fedora) by googling the internet In KDE, I still cannot controll LCD brightness with powerdevil, but that's ok since the keyboard buttons do work.

Kernel config
If you don't care about the details, you can use the following dump of a suitable kernel configuration to start with. You can use it for gentoo-sources, vanilla-sources and tuxonice-sources, just issue "make menuconfig" and save configuration before issuing "make". You will still have to emerge the microcode for the wireless card, install ati proprietary drivers, configure alsa, etc.

/usr/src/linux/.config