Thank you Ubuntu for supporting my Dell 6420 with Sandy Bridge

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Hi i want to say sorry and thanks to ubuntu. With the first release of Ubuntu and unity i was very unhappy about the decision of ubuntu. I went forward to gnome3 and the preview version of gnome3 makes me unhappy too. So i go back to 10.04 LTS with macbuntu mod. Beside my normal private desktop pc, i'm running an dell latitutde notebook with win7 (for office) and ubuntu 10.04.

Now i bought an new latitude E6420 with core i 5 and sandy bridge. So i put my hdd back in this new notebook. Win7 works like a charm, but 10.04 don't know the new hardware... So i decided to replace 10.04 lts with 11.10 beta1. The second contact with unity: the gui freezes and lags a lot . But i forgot that it has been beta state. At this time I thought this is the end of using ubuntu...

So i spent 1 week trying a lot of distro and so i have installed the last versions of mint , opensuse and fedora. The first thing you will see when you boot from livecd is a black screen after the boot manager. So you have to put nomodeset to the kernel at boot time. Now it is possible to boot and see something with the vesa driver. After installation the distros i tried to install sandy compatible intel drivers. I spent a lot of time in this. For me it wasn't possible to take the advantage of my new hardware.

Very disappointed i took a last look to the dell support page. Surprising for me you can download a modded 10.10 ubuntu. This distro has patched some new drivers for intels platform. I began to download the iso.

While downloading 10.10 from dell, i think about all my installation and i point out that ubuntu was the only os which can boot without usin the nomodeset flag. Today i gave ubuntu one more try. At office i have download 11.04. While booting the live cd … wow i can see it in right resolution. UMTS Card is asking for the pin. And wifi adapter tells me about seeing some networks. Not enough to get tears in my eyes. Installing 11.04 and surprise surprise. Bootmanager to MBR works as however. (Suse installed something to MBR and it looks like lilo).

While i writing to you, i copy my home back to my new installation.   Yet everything works out of the box. Standby , 3d Effects, good speed , good power management, wifi and umts/edge.  At this time i have to say: When you are using new hardware, you will have to use ubuntu for best hardware support.

No other distro can handle sandy as good as the april 2011 version. After doing some administration to 11.04 unity is not so bad. We can look forward to 11.10. A lot of people do good things to other distributions, but for me the ubuntu team and the community do it better.

Please comment this …

One last word … I know it's a problem that hardware company’s do not enough to get their product to work with linux. Perhaps it should be a part of intel to make sandy compatible with linux. Thanks to all coders and developers ….

 Thomas

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