Fort Wayne LUG Blogs

As I mentioned, I decided to give up the faithful and anorexically thin Sharp MM10 for a Dell Latitude X1 after I got to play with one at PyCon in Dallas. It came last week and I decided to put it to the test by loading Ubuntu Dapper Drake, flight 4 on it. Amazing, it worked with only one stupid annoyance and one minor hassle.

The stupid annoyance was not connected to the X1, but an apparent bug in the system - when I set synaptic to use a proxy server at school it worked just fine. Then I went home, unset the proxy server and… it didn’t work. Kept complaining that it couldn’t find the proxy server. After 20 minutes of swearing I finally just went and looked at the config files. Sure enough, it had inserted a line setting the proxy to nothing, but then had left the original proxy setting line after it. So it was still using the old proxy. A manual edit took care of that, but a bug that stupid is annoying.

The minor hassle had to do with the fact that X was not using the X1’s native resolution (1280×768). There are wiki pages devoted to the tweaks needed on older versions of Ubuntu to make it work, but with Dapper it’s actually quite easy - install the 915resolution package, manually edit its config file, and restart.

So far, everything else has just worked. The X1 is a slick little machine. It’s a little over 1 inch thick, has a nearly full sized keyboard, and the aforementioned 1280×768 screen. It has 802.11g/b, bluetooth, AC97 modem and ethernet built in. I haven’t tested the modem or bluetooth yet, but everything else seems to work.

The X1 doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot, but it does have CF and SD slots, which both seem to work. The final peripheral port is a special Dell hybrid USB/power port that powers and connects the DVD drive. While I’m not crazy about there being another proprietary connector in the world, this does have 2 advantages: 1) it can be used as a regular USB port, and 2) it removes the need for a power supply for the DVD unit.

So far battery life has been excellent and it seems to perform much better than it’s 1.1 GHz processor speed would indicate.

So the bottom line? I’ve loved the Sharp for the past couple of years - it was invariably the cutest, tiniest, most adorable little machine almost everywhere I went. But the X1 has made me forget about all of that. The cute tiny laptop is dead. Long live the even cuter tiny laptop.