Installing Arch Linux on a Dell Inspiron 1564

Ludovico Fischer

17 Feb 2010

The Inspiron 1564 is a new laptop from Dell, sporting an Intel Arrandale cpu.  The install goes smooth except for the following:

  1. the integrated wireless card, which is a Broadcom and therefore has worse support under Linux than, say, Intel. Here is a quick breakdown of the install steps under Arch Linux.
  2. you will need the most recent kernel you can get at the time of writing (2.6.32), which isn't yet shipped by default in any major distro to get the screen working at native resolution and to get open source wireless drivers.

Let's get started.

Broadcom wireless card

The wireless card is a Broadcom 4312. Broadcom has been notorious for its bad Linux support, recently things have started looking up. Broadcom has provided its own hybrid drivers for this card, and the now the free software b43 driver in the most recent kernel (2.6.32) supports it, provided you supply it with the appropriate firmware. Unfortunately I've experienced frequent connection drops with the b43 . So I've resorted to the proprietary Broadcom driver. Download the dource from Broadcom, then do the usual make dance. Place the resulting wl.ko file where it belongs, in /lib//modules/$(uname -r). Then run

depmod -A

to regenerate the new modules.dep file (the -A switch tells it to only look for recent changes). Now test your new module.

modprobe -r  b43

to unload the b43 module, then

modprobe wl

to load your new driver. Do a quick

iwlist scan

to see if you detect any wireless networks. If you experience weird drops, check that you are not pressing the activate/deactivate button (F2) by mistake. If you are satisfied you can then blacklist the other modules in /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.

Video card (Intel HD Graphics)

Works flawlessly for me with kernel 2.6.32 and the 2.9. intel drivers. Phoronix reports crashes with OpenGL. As I do not game or do any 3D work I cannot say much about this.

Final notes

Function keys work perfectly out of the box, including activating/deactivating wireless, setting screen brightness. I have not tested the audio yet. All in all, a pretty good Linux laptop if you are willing to put up with the semi-proprietary Broadcom drivers.