Yet another Ubuntu laptop - DELL Inspiron 17R

by Jacek Ciolek

When I had to buy a new laptop I wanted something both performing and working nicely with Ubuntu. I am quite fond of DELL laptops and luckily, there are plenty which are certified Ubuntu laptops. The one I have chosen however, DELL Inspiron 17R was not on the list of certified hardware.

Nevertheless, feeling adventerous and encouraged by a whole range of DELL laptops on this list, I took a leap of faith and bought it. Unfortunately unspeakable system version 8 was installed on it, but I took little notice, as Ubuntu can happily co-exist with it. I have even curved out a little partition for the joke of an OS, just for giggles.

I have picked Ubuntu 12.04.3 - stable, reliable, well rounded and frequently updated. No problems during installation. Two things worth mentioning though, after installation on my Inspiron:

  • For dual display setup I had to remove fglrx drivers. Unfortunately the open source radeon drivers do not support my Radeon HD 8730M. On the plus side there is Intel graphics card integrated into IvyBridge. Good older i915 is doing quite well, so see you later Radeon!

  • Dual boot with Windows 8 (flipipng EFI) with nice grub menu at boot time required Boot-Repair (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair), however automatic settings do the trick just fine.

Picture worth 1000 words... Screenshot totally in the GNU spirit ;)