Dell Latitute D620 Laptop and NVIDIA Drivers for Ubuntu

After a recent update to Ubuntu 12.04, my Dell Latitude D620 Laptop quit mirroring the display across the laptop screen and the television connected to the dock’s S-Video port. I had previously chosen not to upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 because of this issue, and 12.04 had worked correctly until today. It seems that the driver installed quit supporting some of the options I needed:

root@ishta:~# nvidia-xconfig --twinview
nvidia-xconfig: unrecognized option: "--twinview"

Invalid commandline, please run `nvidia-xconfig --help` for usage information.

It appears that installing an older version of the NVIDIA drivers:

aptitude install nvidia-173

and removing the current version of the drivers:

aptitude purge nvidia-current

solves the problem. Hopefully this will work for future versions of Ubuntu as well.

Dell Latitute D620 Laptop Wireless and Ubuntu 11.10

After installing Ubuntu 11.04 on my Dell D620, I began noticing some wireless connectivity issues. This included delays or problems connecting to my home wireless network, increased latencies particularly when transferring files, and occasional disconnects. After upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10, the problems got worse. Doing some searching online revealed some possible solutions.

Installing the “b43-fwcutter” and “firmware-b43-installer” packages and rebooting the laptop is what ultimately worked for me.

aptitude install --quiet --assume-yes b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer