Dell Latitude D630

The Dell Latitude D630 is a business line laptop made for corporate users who have a need for durability. This article will tell you how to get the basic components of the laptop running with Arch.

Installation

You can follow the Installation guide to get yourself up and running. I did a pretty standard install, keeping the XP partition that came with the laptop as my company requires all work computers to have Windows on them.

Wireless Networking

Intel 3945

The new installers will detect the Intel 3945 card and give you the option of installing the drivers and module for it but I did not have any success doing that. It is good to have a wired connection to begin with just to make sure you get everything up and running.

To ensure that the Intel 3945 wireless card will work post-installation you will need to install the linux-firmware package.

Broadcom BCM4312

I got this to work using the proprietary Broadcom drivers in AUR. The package is broadcom-wl.

Broadcom BCM4311

Some people have said that broadcom-wl have worked for them. If this does not work, then try B43 drivers. It worked for me by installing the b43-firmware-classic with B43. All of these are avaliable on the AUR.

Xorg Configuration

Xorg configuration is relatively straightforward. If you have the nVidia Quadro card, you will want to install the NVIDIA or Nouveau drivers. If you only have Intel graphics, then install the xf86-video-intel package. It might be a good idea to read the Intel graphics page while installing to see if you need to do anything different.

Recommendations

PC Speaker

To silence GTK apps that love to spew out system beeps for the most mundane of occurrences, you may then have to go into the ALSA settings and specifically mute the PC speaker channel. Then you should no longer hear any sound from it.

Other Recommendations

Many of the recommendations for the Dell Latitude D620#Recommendations apply here too.