Dell Inspiron 15R i7 (Aluminium)| Slackware 13.1

Dell Inspiron 15R i7 (Aluminium) | Slackware 13.1

Laptop has 4GB DDR3 RAM, Intel Core i7 740M 1.73GHz CPU, 750GB HDD
Also Windows 7 Home Premium preinstalled.
There were 3 primary partitions
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/sda3
The first thing i did was to remove Windows from it so I left Dell's /sda1 partition untouched (vfat, only a few MB) and formatted the other 2 to ext3.

/ 40GB
/home 600GB
I did not use swap. (needed if you want to suspend to disk (hibernate)

I made a full Slackware installation from the DVD. Some issues you might have to solve along the way are:

Sound
First we have to find the codec of our sound card
# cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec
Codec: IDT 8192HDB1X5

Wireless
Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:4727] (rev 01)

Blue-tooth
ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp. BCM2046B1 USB 2.0 Hub (part of BCM2046 Bluetooth)

WebCamera on Skype
ID 0c45:6480 Microdia
{works for others applications}

Solutions:

Sound:
If we don`t find the option of our sound`s card codec here http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio-Models.txt
then we try something similar to our codec, that`s what I did.
So for the sound, in /etc/modprobe.d create a file sound.conf
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-s14

Wireless:
From Slackbuilds.org download the broadcom-sta script, which includes the kernel module 'wl'. That contains
the Broadcom-provided proprietary kernel driver that supports a number of
their cards like the BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4321, and BCM4322 chipsets.

Blue-tooth:
There is an option in the BIOS that creates conflicts with the wifi and bluetooth, and you have to disable it.
If you set it to "none", occasionally Bluetooth will work, but not consistently

Web Camera on Skype
I tried everything I found at google and everything I could imagine but camera on skype doesnt work:

no compiz or cairo dock

2.6.36.2-smp
Linux Kernel Configuration:
Device Drivers --->
Multimedia support --->
Video For Linux[*] Video capture adapters --->[*] Autoselect pertinent encoders/decoders and other helper chips[*] V4L USB devices --->
USB Video Class (UVC)[*] UVC input events device support

also

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype --> light of camera turns on but dont work on skype test and after 5" --> Segmentation fault
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so skype --> light of camera turns on but dont work on skype test and after 5" --> Segmentation fault
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l2.so skype --> Segmentation fault
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l2.so skype --> Segmentation fault

{ camera`s driver=v4l2}
I think that something happening between XV and X11
So skype wants XV but my camera dont
I dont give up I just take a break...

ps0: I tried using ati proprietary drivers but didn't work that good, so I uninstalled them and went back to open drivers. If you try catalyst and you want to uninstall it dont forget to reinstall mesa and libdrm

ps1 Dont forget to modprobe coretemp if you want to watch your 4 sensors (for conky etc)

ps2:don`t forget to remove some sticker that you don`t like from your laptop

-r

Comments

update

darkstar:~$ uname -a && cat /etc/*version*
Linux darkstar 2.6.38.7 #3 SMP Sun May 22 16:21:50 CDT 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 740 @ 1.73GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
Slackware 13.37.0
darkstar:~$

now everything works out of the box!
even bluetooth and skype(multilib)

:)