Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude e6320

About a year and a half ago I received a Dell Latitude e6320. Initially it had Windows 7 but I eventually put Ubuntu Linux on it. I've been running Ubuntu on it for over a year now and thought I would share my experience for anyone else looking to pickup this laptop for running Ubuntu as it is appearing on Woot and many other places as refurbished for

around $200.

My system was configured with the Core i5-2520M, 3 cell battery, broadcom wireless, 250GB hard drive and 8 GB of memory. The machine has always performed well and the 8 GB of memory is likely overkill for my day to day needs. Now I have a 6 cell battery and Atheros wireless card, more on that later, and a Samsung 850 SSD.

After first installing Ubuntu on it, which was 13.10 at the time, everything worked out of the box. The graphics is the Intel Sandy Bridge graphics with the i5 and has great Linux support. The touchpad works as expected and defaults to two finger scrolling, the touchpad disable switch worked as did the standby. The sound also worked fine without a hitch, but the audio jack port is the combine microphone/headphone, so you need an adapter for most headsets out there that aren't USB. The wireless card was from Broadcom and it worked out of the box during the install. Speedtests showed the card to perform perfectly fine as expected, but there was a problem as I came to learn later.

I was pleased with how well everything worked because my previous HP DV2 had numerous issues, some of which never got resolved. But after a few weeks, I began to notice an issue. The system sometimes failed to come out of standby. If it was a short period, it would work but not after 6 hours. The machine also would lock up while I used it periodically. I hoped after the upgrade to 14.04 the issue would go away, but it didn't. I thought it might be a overheating issue, but I ruled that out as times when it froze, it wasn't hot and the CPU temps were within normal operating range.

I eventually decided to check if it was the wireless. The laptop has a switch to disable all wireless devices and I found that when that was turned off, the laptop never froze and always came out of standby. I still had the Atheros chipset I bought for my HP DV2 to replace the Broadcom chip in it that performed sporadically so I grabbed it, put it into the Dell praying that the Dell didn't restrict the hardware. The Dell accepted the Atheros card and booted into Ubuntu without a hitch and connected to the wireless. I've not had the system freeze since.

The Dell e6320 has an older chipset compared to what is available now, but it still performs like a champ and works great with Linux. I've found everything works out of the box but if you have a Broadcom ship, be prepared to find an alternative. ThinkPenguin.com has chips that are 100% Linux compatible and its where I bought mine for the HP DV2 that I'm now using in the Dell e6320.

For $200 this laptop is great and once you add some memory if needed and change over to a SSD, the laptop is a great daily Linux driver that will suit the needs of most users. I use this machine now to develop Java applications and browse the web. It isn't flashy but it gets the job done and is a solid built machine.

Samsung Chromebook - Is it useful?

Recently, I picked up the Samsung Chromebook as it seems like a decent device for web browsing at a very compelling price. Since the laptop share hardware closer to a tablet, it runs very cool and has no fans. It has an SSD which offers quick boot speeds. 

So, lets start off with the good and what this machine has going for it. It is light, gets 6 hour battery life and runs cool but yet has with the dual core processor enough power for a good web browsing experience. This makes it great for coffee shops and students taking notes in class. The screen is very bright and has great colors and contrast. The keyboard keys are clearly a lower grade plastic but the keyboard does feel decent and the key spacing feels normal. Finally the touchpad which your finger easily glides over and the gestures to work well.

The laptop doesn't have many ports, but it has HDMI, 2 USB ports one being 3.0. It as a SD card slot which accepts SXDC which can have very high speeds, but the card doesn't insert all the way, so left in it could get snapped off. There is also a headphone jack for planes or to not disturb others.

Now, for the bad. So, this laptop has many limitations. The machine runs Chrome OS, which runs solid but only gives you access to the Internet and applications available in Chrome. This also means the machine is mostly useless without an Internet connection. You can use some application in offline mode that support it The machine has 2GB of memory, which is enough since Chrome OS uses little memory, but don't expect to be able to have piles of tabs open without impacting performance.

The laptop is not perfect, but if the drawbacks are not something that you need or care about, then this little machine could very well be the machine for you. My current laptop runs warm with a short battery life. I got this to do light browsing and emailing and it is working very well at that. I also will be starting classes in the fall and this will be very handy for notes without having to plug in or worry about the fan.