[7217] in Release_7.7_team
Vostro 320 report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Wed Jan 5 12:07:34 2011
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2011 12:07:26 -0500 (EST)
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1101051019400.16012@INFINITE-LOOP.mit.edu>
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As some of you know, I've been investigating Dell's iMac-like offering,
the Vostro 320, as a replacement for some quickstations, particularly
the ones in Stata. The goal here is to provide a VESA-mountable machine
without restricting access to drives or power buttons (as is currently the
case in Stata).
Overall, the results are encouraging with Lucid. All major features are
supported, including graphics (i915-based), ethernet (RTL8111 chipset),
and audio (Intel N10-based). Wireless (BCM4312) is supported with
restricted drivers. Other things that "just work" are the memory-card
reader (SD/MMC/MS), the i.Link port, and the webcam (UVC-based).
PXE is supported (enabled as "Ethernet Boot ROM" in the BIOS), but I could
not get it to work even after repeated attempts. I'm tempted to blame the
poor state of PXE in general, but I'll do some more digging later. At
the moment, PXE only seems to work when connected through a hub with at
least one other machine connected to the hub (yes, really). A gPXE CD and
USB stick worked fine.
The display is a re-branded Samsung panel.
It comes with a wireless KB and mouse, but they use a USB frob (not BT),
which is guaranteed to walk off. One assumes that if we order these in
bulk we can convince dell to swap in a regular KB and mouse.
One potential downside is that the optical drive is a laptop-tray style,
not slot loading, and probably won't stand up to a lot of abuse. We can
make the argument that most people don't use optical drives on
quickstations.
-Jon
