Author Topic: 2009 Dell Latitude e6400 w/ intel core 2 duo  (Read 10267 times)

Rich442

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2009 Dell Latitude e6400 w/ intel core 2 duo
« on: April 09, 2016, 04:38:18 am »
Just installed eCS 2.2 (beta II) on my Dell Latitude e6400 and wanted to share my experience.


This 14" Dell Latitude e6400 has an 80 GB hard drive, 2 GB RAM, an Intel core 2 Duo processor and 2.41 gHz processor speed. Mine was  shipped to me in 2009 with the 64-bit Windows Vista Business edition. Dell does not provide support for Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10, but it works well  and is very fast on Windows 10 and is also very good with Windows 8.1. This is a tough little laptop and is very common. It can be purchased for a low price from nearly any hardware vendor.

[NOTE]: Dell no longer sells this laptop directly and they recomend the Dell Latitude (E6430) premier instead.These newer latitudes are about $1,000 each. Mine was $250 from a prominent reseller.

Since this laptop was built before the introduction of the newer/faster UEFI BIOS versions, it requires a little bit of thought and preparation before installing WARP 3, 4 or WARP Server for ebusiness. I was not able to install OS/2 version 2.1.

For the A15 BIOS, Dell used a variety of security and boot-checking options that together are very similar to the functionality of our current UEFI computers. Most of these need to be adjusted or disabled to enable a non-UEFI operating system like warp 4 to boot normally. These security options are spread across the security, boot sequence, performance and system management sections of the setup screens

I adjusted the following security features to enable OS/2 to load its install sequence:

Under Security:
Disabled fast boot and instead chose "thorough" under boot checking
Disabled password checking during boot
Disabled Intel speedstep
disabled camera
disabled Fn key support
disabled lighted keyboard


At this point, I inserted the eCS 2.2 beta II DVD and booted from the DVD drive. eCS Installation volume manager did not recognize my NTFS main partition or my Windows journal partition. I used the FreeDOS 1.1 FDISK utility to wipe the drive of the non-DOS partitions. I enabled FAT32 large disk support and created one huge 80 GB partition. I exited Fdisk and rebooted the laptop with the eCS 2.2 DVD in the drive. This time, LVM had no problem identifying my disk and created a new MBR. After another reboot the installation started again and the LVM was able to work with my hard drive. I used simple install  to see where it would take me. I recommend using advanced install method so that system files can be in one partition while user data is located on another partition.

eCS automatically loaded ACPI support for the Intel core 2 Duo so multiprocessor support was not a problem.

For disk preparation, I chose to format the drive using JFS w. After 1 hour and 16 minutes of disk checking,  the installer began to format hard drive with JFS. After that, the installation was fairly straightforward and problem-free. my IDT Integrated Audio Sound card was automatically detected and the UNIAUD driver was installed.  I chose  Generic VGA for my monitor type rather than use the suggested Scitech driver. Afterwards, I installed the Panorama driver. I skipped network configuration for the time being.

After the first reboot, the installer automatically suggested the Panorama video driver. I was able to increase the display resolution
and set up the "eCS desktop" wallpaper. For wireless networking, I am using the "Iogear universal wireless-n adapter" (GWU627).
It needs to use a static IP address (192.168.1.252) before being connected with an existing network


 
« Last Edit: April 15, 2016, 08:27:17 pm by Richard Crowley »

Dave Yeo

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Re: 2009 Dell Latitude e6400 w/ intel core 2 duo
« Reply #1 on: April 09, 2016, 10:01:14 am »
Hows the battery life?
I have a T42, officially supported by OS/2 and it gets about half the battery life on OS/2 compared to Win XP

Rich442

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Sysbench results
« Reply #2 on: April 09, 2016, 03:07:46 pm »
5 hours unplugged and on battery
12 hours plugged  into an outlet. (This is identical to what I used to  get while running Windows 10)
I suppose it has to do with the age of the machine and the battery itself.

Battery life (with windows 7, 8.x and  10) varied a bit depending on whether I was using multimedia or other cpu-intensive stuff. I wouldn't use battery as a selling point of this laptop. For windows 10, the battery would last about 5-6 hours during normal usage and about 4 hours when viewing movies or online streaming content (like youtube).

I feel that my testing facility is not ideal.
I have owned this laptop for almost four years and it is still using its original battery and AC adapter. I will post Sysbench results as soon as I can get a good sample.

I have to go to work today, but will post my test data when I get home. :)

Here is the text output of "Run all tests" in Sysbench 0.9   Sysbench

Sysbench (0.9.1d) results:
(I attached the easier-to-read html below):

Quote
PM-Graphics-marks:   15.2
CPU integer-marks:    88
CPU floating point-marks:   405
DIVE-marks:   1075
File I/O-marks:   253
Memory-marks:   7275
Simultaneous I/O-marks:   149
Disk I/O-marks   : 253


And here is the output from PCI /s (v. 2.2)
Quote
PCI Dump 15 Apr 2016 09:21:02
lspci version 2.2.3
...

Quote
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2940 (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
   Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
   Bus: primary=00, secondary=0b, subordinate=0b, sec-latency=0
   Capabilities: [40] Express Root Port (Slot+) IRQ 0
   Capabilities: [80] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0
...
Quote
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 10f5 (rev 03)
   Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 0233
   Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
   Memory at f6ae0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
   Memory at f6adb000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
   I/O ports at efe0
   Capabilities: [c8] Power Management version 2
   Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
   Capabilities: [e0] #13 [0306]
...
Quote
00:03.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2a44 (rev 07)
   Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 0233
   Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
   Memory at f6ad9ef0 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)
   Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
   Capabilities: [8c] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
...
« Last Edit: April 15, 2016, 08:44:41 pm by Richard Crowley »

Rich442

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networking with wifi or ethernet
« Reply #3 on: April 13, 2016, 06:15:13 pm »
OK, Networking for the E-series was a bit of a puzzle for me,

The Latitude e6400 (and the Dell Latitude E-series in general) have two means of connecting to the web or a local network:

*********
Wireless**
*********

The E-series Latitudes feature the popular Intel 5100 wireless adapter. Intel calls it the  "Intel® Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300 and Intel® WiFi Link 5100". In my experience, It is very reliable and works out-of-the-box on many Windows and GNU/Linux setups.

***************
Ethernet adapter**
***************

The second option for connecting the e6400 to a network is an ethernet port located on the back of the machine close to the battery compartment.
Again, Dell uses an Intel product. This time it is the Intel® 82579 Gigabit Ethernet PHY also known as the
Intel 82579 LM

The Intel datasheet lives here.


The eCS 2.2 installer recognizes the ethernet adapter as an Intel ethernet Adapter and installs the Intel PRO/1000 device driver. Unfortunately, the Intel PRO/1000 driver does not specifically support the 82579LM.

The OS/2 driver was derived from the source code of the linux e1000e driver.

Intel Support Home seems to corroborate this


Intel Support Home
recommends their OS-independent e1000e driver for this particular device (the 82579LM).
***
***
***
Here is the source RPM for the e1000e for CentOS/ Redhat EL 6.

NOTE: pbone repository requires you to register before downloading packages.

 I hope this is helpful to someone thinking about Dell laptops with eCS installed.  :D
« Last Edit: April 16, 2016, 01:13:52 am by Richard Crowley »

Pete

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Re: 2009 Dell Latitude e6400 w/ intel core 2 duo
« Reply #4 on: April 16, 2016, 12:22:37 pm »
Hi Richard

I have a Dell E5500 laptop that was originally supplied with a Broadcom nic and Broadcom wireless nic.

Neither nic would work with eCS - and there do not seem to be any plans to create the needed drivers.

After a bit of research I found that I could swap out the Broadcom wireless nic for an Intel (Dell) 5100 which I did.

I then installed genmac and an "experimental " genmac driver package containing an Intel 5100 driver 

After installing and rebooting the wireless nic driver did not get loaded at boot as the "hardware not found" message appeared.

Investigating this I found that the NIF file used by this driver had a few typos - it fact everywhere that it should say 4232 it said 4332. I uninstalled the driver using MPTS - changed it to the NoAdapter driver and rebooted.

I then corrected the typos in the NIF file and ran MPTS to Change nic driver to use this corrected NIF, rebooted and have a Dell E5500 with working wireless nic - just a lot easier than modifying and compiling linux source code as far as I am concerned  :-)

I believe the driver has now been corrected and is available here ftp://genmac@ftp.os2voice.org/GenMU_INTEL_WIFI-0-4-6.wpi

Of course the touchpad on the Dell E5500 does not work at all with OS/2 based systems so I have to also truck a mouse around with the laptop. Apart from that the E5500 works well with eCS2.2beta2 + Arca Noae driver updates.


Regards

Pete





Rich442

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Re: 2009 Dell Latitude e6400 w/ intel core 2 duo
« Reply #5 on: April 17, 2016, 08:31:04 am »

I have a Dell E5500 laptop that was originally supplied with a Broadcom nic and Broadcom wireless nic.

Neither nic would work with eCS - and there do not seem to be any plans to create the needed drivers.
Of course the touchpad on the Dell E5500 does not work at all with OS/2 based systems so I have to also truck a mouse around with the laptop. Apart from that the E5500 works well with eCS2.2beta2 + Arca Noae driver updates.

Thanks for the response! :)
I see that the E6400 and the E5500 share some  of the same components and a few drivers (at least for the official Dell diagnostics and chipset drivers).

I do use the genmac driver to operate the Intel 5100 network card/chipset. The ethernet adapter is operated by the official e1000e driver available from Mensys. I do use a small wireless mouse at my workstation. For me, my Latitude E is too heavy to be ported around much. There is so much metal in the case

I mentioned the CentOS linux source code for the e1000e because Intel provides that code as an "OS independent driver" (for linux and FreeBSD users). I thought it was interesting that there was a (distant) connection between the official Mensys driver for OS/2 and the code used in enterprise linux.

The information (about the intel linux/BSD code) is less important because eCS already provides the e1000e and GenMAC drivers.
It was a part of my learning process when I was trying to learn more about this chipset.

I haven't tried any of the Arca Noae drivers in my tests because I wanted to see how far I could get with just the Hobbes/UNM OS/2 archive and the software support subscription from Mensys and XEU.


« Last Edit: April 17, 2016, 06:35:42 pm by Richard Crowley »