Archive for Dell Studio 17
I’m using Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit, Intrepid Ibex, but these instructions should work for users of other distros (such as Linux Mint, Fedora, Sabayon, etc) as well.
This morning I needed to pull some images off of my camera’s SD card using my Dell Studio 17’s built-in card reader. I plugged the card in, got sidetracked for a few minutes, and then realized that I couldn’t find a mount point for my card.
Usually when I plug in the card, it is automatically identified and mounted. Then Nautilus would show a listing in the left-hand pane for the card allowing me easy access to the contents. However, that didn’t happen today.
I thought about rebooting in order to see if it was just a fluke, but I didn’t want to save all my projects, close out all my applications, reboot, and load everything back up. So, I thought I’d see about mounting the device manually. Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult at all.
Continue reading “Mount Dell Studio 17 Card Reader in Ubuntu”
A visitor to the site mentioned that he has the same laptop as I have yet is running Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu. He said that all the help that I was offering for getting Ubuntu to run well on the Studio 17 worked for him in Linux Mint except the headphone fix didn’t work. So, I dug in to see if I could find a solution.
I installed Linux Mint on my Dell Studio 1735 two nights ago and got the headphone jacks working successfully. Here’s step-by-step what I did:
Continue reading “Dell Studio 17, Headphones, and Linux Mint”
A number of updates were installed on my machine yesterday. Ubuntu asked me to reboot, but I was busy, so I never ended up doing that yesterday. This morning, I booted my machine and was very surprised to find out that my headphone jacks no longer worked. Needless to say, I was upset.
As I discussed in a previous post, I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on a Dell Studio 17 laptop and getting the headphones to work required some workarounds. Basically, you had to set up the headphones to be line outs which caused one of the jacks to function but failed to mute the speakers when headphones were plugged in. This resulted in needing to manually mute and unmute the Front audio channel when you used or removed headphones. It’s because of this workaround that I thought the jack no longer worked.
Continue reading “Headphones Jacks Now Fully Work on Dell Studio 17 Running Ubuntu”
I received a comment from John asking about using a mic with Ubuntu on a Dell Studio. I hadn’t tried to use my mic before, so I thought that it was time to try it out. After playing around a bit, I figured it out.
Continue reading “Using the Mic on a Dell Studio with Ubuntu”
As of today, it has been exactly two weeks since I started using Ubuntu as my OS at the office. Not only that, it’s been two weeks since my office computer (Dell Studio 17) has booted into Windows.
I left Windows on the system “just in case,” but much to my surprise, I haven’t needed it once. Running Ubuntu is different than running Windows, but it’s not any more difficult. In fact, Ubuntu is much more powerful and forgiving than Windows has been. I can work so much faster now that I’m running Ubuntu than I ever have been able to with Windows, and that’s without being able to use my favorite editor, Crimson Editor.
I’m now on my fifth day of using Ubuntu on my office machine. Slowly, I’m starting to get accustomed to working with it, but there are still a variety of things that I still need to do from time to time.
For those that haven’t read my previous posts on this topic, I’ve switched from Windows Vista to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) on my Dell Studio 17 laptop that I use at the office. Even though Ubuntu has a great ability to “just work,” often times it is difficult and unintuitive to get certain things to work. So, I decided to blog about all those difficulties so that I can have this information to rely on later and so others can benefit from my experience.





