Ubuntu 10.04LTS on Dell Latitude E6320

Wireless Networking (wlan)
There was a drama with the install... when I bought this thing I was half expecting to have compatibility issues with the 3G card, but I wasn't expecting the Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6205 (802.11 a/b/g/n) WiFi card to be a problem. Bleeding edge, huh?


The solution turned out to be pretty simple... head to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download and download the compat-wireless package, make and install it using the instructions provided. Reboot, and presto... working WiFi.


Processor Frequency Scaling
Issue number two... to get as much life out of the battery as possible, I want to scale back the processors as much as possible most of the time. For this I am using 'cpufreq-selector', and setting it to Powersave. Unfortunately, the package doesn't set you last setting as a default. An easy way to work around this is to add a new start-up application, and give it the following command:

cpufreq-selector -g powersave &

Edit: Seems you need to work with multiple processors... so a script would look a bit like this:

#!/bin/bash

cpufreq-selector -c 0 -g powersave &

cpufreq-selector -c 1 -g powersave &

cpufreq-selector -c 2 -g powersave &

cpufreq-selector -c 3 -g powersave &

exit 0

Sound/Audio
Issue number three... sound doesn't work out of the box. The solution is simple and can be found here, basicall we need to install the latest development alsa drivers.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install linux-alsa-driver-modules-$(uname -r)

And reboot.