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Short report on Dell 1420N laptop upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid to Jaunty

Mon, 2009-05-11 07:17 — victorkane

Had upgraded my 1420N before, ultimately to Hardy, with problems losing sound, but muddled on through thanks to Dell Linux wiki. Usual problems with wi-fi led, sound, on every kernel upgrade, solved by backporting and following instructions on the wiki.

So it was with trepidation that I upgraded in one night from Hardy to Intrepid to Jaunty.

With Intrepid, the only issue was getting the cool new Network Manager to manage. It was grayed out. I had no visible network configuration yet my wireless (which I adventurously used for the upgrade) "just worked". Found through Googling that this was a feature, not a bug. So was able to enable the cool new (bears repeating) Network Manager by editing (after saving a copy) /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf to read as follows:

[main]
plugins=keyfile

[ifupdown]
managed=true
Then, with Jaunty, sound was wonky, then went to System/Preferences/Sound and selected some tracks (Master, Headphones, PCM, Capture...) for the HDA Intel (Alsa mixer) device. Then went to Applications/Sound and Video/Mixer, and was told to click on the select controls button in the bottom left corner, because none had been selected. Selected Master, Headphone, then Capture, Capture1 and Capture2 (for good measure). With delight sound working great, even keyboard controls now fully functional, which they weren't before!!!
Only down side has been that compiz now gone, haven't had time to figure out how to bring it back. Preferences/Appearance/Visual Effects tells me "Desktop effects could not be enabled", even though it seemed to find a driver. Compiz Config Settings Manager, which I had installed, was reset to default values. Anyone have any ideas?
Overall: delighted.
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