Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge *Part 2*

Hi all,
Writing this on my new but bought on ebay m4400. The previous owner had it for just a couple of weeks, and babied it. 9-cell attery still has 99% life, machine looked unused when I got it, it got sold as an unwanted gift to raise $$ towards the MacBook he wanted.
Anyway, just trying a OCZ 64GB SSD as the primary drive, with a fresh install of Win7 64 bit. The sucker was fast before, now it flies. Another nice couple of benefits of the SSD are that the machine runs cooler, the fan's almost never kick in, and it's silent.
Just one question that you might be able to help me with: what's generally the best Linux OS for the m4400? I very briefly flirted with Ubuntu 10.04 last night, and that seems nice......but......anything that enables everything to work really well out of the box??
Thanks for any pointers/tips.

 

Fedora 14 (64-bit KDE) works great on my M4400. Takes a little more work to set up for audio/video use but everything works OOTB (Intel WiFi, webcam, SD cards). If you have specific questions ask away.

 

Can you give me more details about what you had to do with Audio and Video to get it working well please?
I believe I have a Fedora 14 disk I burned a couple of weeks ago.

 

There are a few pages like this one that go through the steps for audio and dvd setup: Fedora 14 Post Installation Guide - my-guides.net

The choice of audio and video players is a matter of preference and whether you prefer KDE or GNOME apps. But you have to get the non-pure-free codecs installed for things like dvd playback to work under Fedora.

I am using the default nouveau video drivers but if you need good 3D gaming performance you'll probably want to go through the steps to convert to the nvidia driver.

Good luck!

 

Thanks for the info, I'll give it a try soon.
One thing that's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread......the faint clicking noise that occurs that others have attributed to the HD heads parking. Well, I get what I presume is the same noise on startup, or when resuming from sleep (running Win7 ultimate). What's perplexing though is that I now have an OCZ SSD, so it can't be the heads as they don't exist. I remember the noise when I had a typical spinning HD too.
My guess is that the noise is some solenoid or switch. I am not concerned, just curious.

 

I don't have or notice a clicking noise and my WD drives are very quiet (unlike recent Seagates!). My DVD drive makes one lurch/clunk sound when I boot but otherwise both my primary Dell laptops are quiet.

You can PM me with any F14 questions.

 

Just wondering: what's the boot time on your m4400 with Fedora 14.........from just after port, till you have a functional desktop???
I love a fast boot (as the actress said to the Bishop).

 

I get about 63 s after POST. Yes, I'd like a fast SSD on my next machine! The *buntus have Fedora beat on boot time these days. As a developer I prefer Fedora but for more of a user focus it is probably not the best choice.

BTW, Fusion is Fedora + codecs + other non-pure-FOSS useful stuff, and their v.14 is due out RSN. Still won't match Ubuntu boot time though.

 

Well, the SSD did make a difference wrt boot time: on average boot time went down by about 40%. The other impact that the SSD makes is on general system speediness: opening large programs etc seems to happen pretty much instantaneously. Bye bye hourglass.
It'd be even more impressive if I had a really fast SSD. I just have an OCZ "Solid", which has moderate speed. The Read speed is pretty good though, and that's what makes the biggest difference. Best $75 I can imagine spending, performance-wise.
BTW, fastest boot time of a "full" distro I tried so far was a quick install I did of Peppermint "Ice". No tweaking, and the boot time (just after POST to a working desktop *with* working wifi connection, was just 13 seconds. I'd guess Win7 Ultimate, with all tweaks, is presently about 40 secs (edit: just rebooted, from just after POST to working desktop with wifi working is 32 seconds), will have to time the next boot. As Win7 is fast enough, *rock* solid, and does everything I need, it makes the care and feeding of a different OS hard to contemplate right now.

 

There's a line in the BIOS that informs about battery wear %, at least with my A24 BIOS there is.