Friday, April 23, 2010

Dell Inspiron 5150 Laptop working great with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx

I installed the Release Candidate of  Ubuntu 10.04  LTS Lucid Lynx on my old Dell Inspiron 5150 Laptop.  I have had this laptop for about 7 years, maybe even longer than that.  So far it appears that everything that worked in Ubuntu 9.10 still works the same under  Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx. I was a little afraid that they may drop support for older hardware or something, but they did not seem to in the case if this old Dell Inspiron laptop.  You never know...


The one thing that is is different with this laptop is that the internal sound card stopped working several months ago.  This is a hardware issue as it just suddenly stopped working.  I guess the transmitter or the reciever is worn out.  We used this computer extensively as a dekstop, so I guess it just gave up.

Rummaging through my junk drawer, I found an old PCMIA wireless card that fit in the slot, and Ubuntu recognized it immediately via the restricted drivers tool.  That was a nice suprise!

I also went out and purchased 2GB of laptop memory and installed it for an upgrade from the 512MB it was carrying.

So, everything still works on this old Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop, wireless, headphones, and speakers.  I will keep this old computer around for a few more years. With the long term support offered by Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, why not?  This laptop still works as a good internet surfer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi - Glad that everything's working ok on your Inspiron 5150. After installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid on my newly revived laptop (new hard drive) I found everything working with one exception:
can't seem to record audio input. How did you get your microphone working?
MMH

JAMcLynne said...

One thing I did not test was audio input. Although I did use skype with a previous version of Ubuntu and it seems to work OK...