Dell Vostro 2420 with Ubuntu 11.10 Preinstalled.

Going back to my university days I had said that if I was in the position to purchase a laptop directly from a large manufacture with Linux pre-installed that I'd give it try - well, I'm in the position now, so I ordered a Dell Vostro 2420 with Ubuntu 11.10 pre-installed.

Let's look at the hardware:

The Vostro case of the 2420 series follows closely to the Vostro 15xx series (I have a Vostro 1540 I use for Windows 7 Professional testing).

• Intel Core i3-2328M CPU @ 2.20 GHz (2 core, 4 threads)
• Intel Mobile HM75 Express Chipset
• 4 GB Ram (256MB used by Video)
• HD 3000 Graphics (Intel Sandybridge Mobile Driver)
• 500 GB 5400 rpm HDD
• Integrated Gigabit Ethernet
• 802.11 b/g/n wireless and Bluetooth combo V4.0+HS
• 8x CD/DVD +/- Burner
• 2 x 2W speakers
• 1.0 MP HD Camera w/ digital microphone
• 6-cell Lithium Ion battery
• 65 Watt power adapter

Un-boxing:

So what does this laptop look like?

The Vostro 2420 comes in standard Dell packaging, I detected no damage to any of the contents. As pictured, the box contained the laptop, power cord and adaptor, environmental, warranty, and parts paperwork.

Taking a closer look on the left side of the laptop we can see the ethernet , svga, and two USB ports.

On the right side we can see two more USB ports, the CD/DVD Burner, and the audio headset and Microphone in ports.

On the front panel the usual set of LED indicator lights can be found on the lefthand side, while in the centre the SD MMC MS slot is accessible.

Taking apart the case:

As above I was quite happy with the hardware, however there was one issue - user access to the interior of the case left my pristine laptop with gouges in keyboard inlay. The issue is that you have to pry back four clips in the keyboard tray to gain access to the inside of the machine. If you do remove the keyboard you will however find that accessing the two So-Dimm slots easy. Further deconstruction of the laptop is required from here to access the hard drive.

Be careful when unlocking the clips that hold in the keyboard, it's easy to gouge the surrounding plastics.

Things I liked:

Ubuntu pre-installed - it's not difficult to install Ubuntu on most common machines, but having it come factory installed is wonderful. Seeing each major hardware feature functioning right out of the box is something that those of us that helped to organize Linux Install Fests like to see. In my testing I've tried the webcam, wifi, bluetooth, closing the lid to put the laptop asleep and have it wake up again, and the various function buttons for back light, volume, etc - they just work as you'd expect them too :)

Having a Ubuntu case badge - again its nice to not have to carry around a badge for an OS I'm not using (I will note that the windows key remains on the keyboard).

Things I didn't like - a couple of setup issues:

The setup of the laptop was for the most part plug and play, however there were a few little setup issues that I had to resolve.

Swap had to be manually enabled. 

The basic commands involved to enable swap were:
sudo -s
cd /usr/local
dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=4G count=1
mkswap -L SWAP swapfile
swapon

Then editing /etc/fstab and /etc/rc.local to ensure that the swap space would be used on each boot up.

System Info did not display the graphics driver. 

To remedy this execute the following in a terminal session:
sudo apt-get install mesa-utils

Any benchmarks?

This machine wasn't purchased to be a main development rig, or for load testing - it's purpose is to do general build and runtime testing. This being said I ran two simple operations to gain a base level understanding of this system's capabilities for workloads it'll be seeing.

Building Apache Karaf 2.2.x Branch with Maven 2.2.1 and Java 1.6.0_35 (note: Maven was in off line mode)

Apache ActiveMQ 5.6.0 KahaDB Disk Benchmark using Java 1.6.0_35.

In my first test I built Apache Karaf 2.2.x source tree in Maven offline mode, which took just over 6 minutes build time. Please note that this build includes kit assembly and test case execution.

In my second test I ran the Apache ActiveMQ KahaDB Disk Benchmark test. The laptop's 500 GB 5400 RPM SATA drive stats are about where I'd expect a drive of its class to score.

Overall opinion?

As a pre-installed, general purpose Linux machine it's quite good. Out of the box it was straight forward to configure and have up and running on my network in just a few minutes. Basic office productivity apps were on my desktop, and the Ubuntu software centre made it easy to find more applications. As a build validation and test bed it should keep up with work loads I'll be throwing at it as long as I keep the laptop inherent capabilities in mind. If I find that it's not keeping up than it should be a simple process to add some additional ram and swap the hard drive for a solid state device.

Would I buy another one? 

As this system stands, if I had the need for another Linux laptop for general purpose work loads I would order this unit again.

Update!:

I recently updated the Vostro 2420's hardware and OS installation - read about the process and results here.