November 8, 2007
Ubuntu (7.10) on Dell Laptop
I put Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop on a spare laptop at work (Dell Latitude D400). I immediately notice the hard drive clicking problem discussed recently in the media regarding Ubuntu (Slashdot).
More specifics:
For fear of killing the drive prematurely, I decided to apply one of the suggested fixes. I used the “99-hdd-spin-fix.sh” method described in the bug report above. That definitely stops the clicking. Unfortunately, it totally disables auto parking of the head/spin down (or whatever actually happens during a LOAD_CYCLE). This is confirmed from running:
smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda | grep 193;
I’m guessing that 99-hdd-spin-fix could be less aggressive by using a lower value for “hdparm -B”. However, one individual that posted to the bug report had difficulty mapping actual behavior to the 0-255 possible values.
Finally, I decided to leave it as is but I enabled ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE in /etc/default/acpi-support. I think this is a nice solution because I normally have the laptop plugged in and don’t need the aggressive hard drive power management. However when unplugged I like the idea of having more power as well as keeping the hard drive head parked nearly as often as possible (for fear of bumps/drops that might crash the drive). Seems to work so far and queries with smartctl seem to confirm everything.
An unrelated problem I ran into was that the laptop could NOT hibernate or go into standby. This was solved by disabling compiz under: System->Preferences->Appearance:Visual Effects.