Corvus frugilegus

First of all a few words of warning (in case you are browsing this looking for some shopping advice). Dell Latitude D600 is a typical business notebook - not very fast and not very pretty but equipped with some goodies (such as LPT and RS232 ports) that are rarely found on contemporary notebooks. This said I must add that the quality of Dell notebooks goes steadily down, and this machine is a good example. Previous Latitudes were quite nice and the build quality was ok. This one is terrible, especially when compared with IBM (well, Lenovo now) products. Various parts (especially rubber spacers) tear off, case is squeaky, the palmrest can get quite hot (HDD is installed just directly beneath the place where you usually put your left palm) etc. Performance is also not very impressive. In short - if you are purchasing a notebook for yourself, stay away from is model.

I received this notebook as my work machine - but trying not to offend anyone, instead of complaining (I was using T Thinkpad previously - it is like heaven and hell, really), I just decided to set up my environment on it. It has seen Fedora 4, Kubuntu Hoary and Breezy and various versions of Suse (including SLICK) - most of these work well, Fedora probably being the worst as far as hardware detection is concerned. Currently I have OpenSuse 10.0 (OK, Suse Linux OSS 10.0) installed.

Specifications and out of the box hardware detection

• CPU - Centrino Pentium M 1500, speedstep works
• RAM - 256 MB, DDR - a bit too little for some tasks
• LCD - TFT, 15″, 1400×1050 resolution, quite fragile inner plastics and lid casing
• Audio - standard Intel 82801, AC97 - works well with ALSA
• Modem - Conexant Winmodem, I have to test it yest, but Suse provides apropriate drivers in their non-OSS YaST repositories

Power management, hibernation, suspend etc.
Additional software
Kompose
Katapult
Lipstik style

Mandatory desktop screenshot


… to be completed