My old Dell laptop finally died a few weeks ago. It had been on its “last legs” for quite some time, but when the screen refused to display anything the other week I knew it was no more
Dell have been running quite a few attractive offers on both desktops and laptops over the past few months, so the price on the Inspiron 630m wasn’t as high as I expected.
The laptop ships with Windows XP Home pre-installed, though there are no media included (aren’t they meant to ship the media with all new PCs?).
I was hoping to set it up as a dual boot, but made a bit of a mess of the windows partition. I’m not overly concerned as I really don’t need windows for anything these days anyway. It’s not as if I ever intend using the laptop for gaming..
I’d love to give some really “fascinating” insights into installing Ubuntu breezy on a 630m, but it was a really boring process. It just worked!
The only minor tweak that was required was the wireless card settings in the bios, which for some reason are off on boot by default.
Apart from that it was dead boring 
The entire process would have only taken an hour (including downloading all the updates etc.,) if I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to repartition the hard drive to allow for the dual boot (of course I messed that up )
From Rob:
Does power control work correctly?
From Vennec:
Hi,
I’m in the same case: same brand new laptop and same excellent Linux distro.
I tried to write a small review on the topic. (The URL is mentioned above…)
As you say, there’s not much to say about it, almost everything just works out of the box!
For Rob: I’ve got no problem with ACPI/Power Management. (Have a look at my review!)
From Vennec:
Oups, here’s the adress:
http://lokorn.neuf.fr/index.html
From Álvaro:
Hello.
I’ve the same laptop, it’s almost working, but when I close the lid, the screen turns off, and I can’t get it to turn on again. Does it happen to you? Thank you very much.
From blacknight:
Alvaro – I have the same issue.. but it doesn’t bother me too much. If I close the lid it’s usually because I’m shutting down
Michele
From Álvaro:
If you’re interested, I’ve found a solution. You should download and install dpms. After that, you can use dpms on to turn on the screen and dpms off to turn it off, so using it with ACPI is trivial…
Hope it helps
From blacknight:
Alvaro
Is there a .deb package available?
From Álvaro:
I think so: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~mjg59/laptops/
From Álvaro:
Hello again.
I would like to ask you a question about the laptop: Does your sound work properly?
If I plug the hearphones, the speakers aren’t muted, and I can’t get to use the microphone. Does it happen to you?
Thank you very much.
From blacknight:
Alvaro – I’ve never tried headphones, so I don’t know if it works like that or not. If I get chance I’ll test it over the next couple of days
Michele
From Vennec:
You’re right, Alvaro.
I get audio from both headphone and speakers, and didn’t manage to mute one of the two.
I didn’t notice it before…
For the microphone, check the volume with alsamixer, it should work.
From shipud:
Any solution for the non-muting speakers on the 630m? I’m about to order this machine and I am just wondering….
From Vennec:
It seems someone has found a kid of fix for this issue by recompiling ALSA:
http://www.disgruntledgoat.com/content/useful/gentoo_on_inspiron630m.php#audio
From Álvaro:
Michelle: I couln’t reply sooner (too much work). Thank you for the info.
Shipud: I’ve downloaded ALSA from it’s webpage, disabled the ALSA support on the kernel and built it from the sources I’ve downloaded. Now I have no speakers at all, but headphones work fine (which is good for me).
From Max:
I bought a new 630m and trying to install Win XP Pro but I am getting a blue screen error and could not install it.
Can anyone suggest a good way to install Win XP Pro only in 630m.
Thanks,
Max.
From Neeraj:
I bought new Dell Inspiron 630m . But microphone is not working. Please help me how to configure it.
Thanks in advance.
From Lorenzo:
I have the same machine where I am writing from. Great linux machine. I use Fedora Core 4.
Known Issues
LINUX
* Bluetooth (I was not able to configure OK)
* Alsa (headphones don’t mute when headphones are plguged-in)
* SD Multireader: It doesnt work yet (propietary function, so… no support in linux)
* DRI no acceleration to i915 in xorg 6.8.
WINDOWS
* Windows XP Professional freezes and reboots with SP2. SP1 works really OK but it doesn’t detect natively SD cards. You have to use a workaround if someone is interested on it, mail me: lawwait (_AT_NO_SPAM) yahoo (DOT_NO_SPAM) es
From Álvaro:
Lorenzo: I’ve written an entry in my blog for this laptop, there you can find how to get DRI acceleration.
The url is http://perseverantia.com/index.php?p=429
From nisse:
“no media included”. With dell you have to select that you want media with your computer.
Álvaro: Have any idea why WinXP Pro SP2 wont work?
From Lawrence:
Finally bluetooth works OK in Linux. It is interesting to notice that if you have disabled bluetooth interface from Windows, you have died. If you leave the bluetooth interface enabled in Windows you will able to work with the interface in Linux. In other case, it will not work.
From Raul:
Hi, I’ve a 630m and I’m solved the sound problem.
I updated the latest ALSA driver following the this procedure:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/alsa/alsa-driver/INSTALL?rev=1.203&view=markup
And, you can download the driver from:
http://www.alsa-project.org/download.php
Now, If I plug the hearphones, the speakers are muted !!!
Good Luck.
From mor:
I just updated ALSA to 1.0.11 and everything works perfectly. Speakers mute when headphones plugged in and sound works after resuming from Suspend-To-Ram mode.
From Ryan:
I have a dell inspiron 600m and am trying to dual boot windows XP which is allready installed and Ubuntu. When running the live CD and trying to install Ubuntu it does not give me an option to partition my hard drive automatically, I must erase the entire disk or partition manually! When I go to partition manually I get stuck since there already exists 3 primary partitions I am only allowed to make 1 more when I would really like to make 2. Does anybody know an EASY and SAFE way to get rid of a partition that is currently on my hard drive?
From michele:
Unless things have changed dramatically the live CD is not the one to use for installing.
If you need to partition your drives I’d recommend something like Partition Magic
From stanley:
hi, guy, I am installing debian on my inspiron 630m. could you send me your config file for reference. It is /boot/config-***, my mail is stanleymiao@hotmail.com. thank you very much.