Notice: the text in red has been deleted from the previous revision, the text in green has been added in this revision and the text in gray has not been changed.
differences in the entry: vendor
Dell
differences in the entry: model name
Alienware M11x R1
differences in the entry: subtype (notebook or netbook)
notebook
differences in the entry: architecture
amd64
differences in the entry: does it have a free bios?
no
differences in the entry: can free operating systems be installed?
yes
differences in the entry: does the device prevent the installation of wifi cards not-approved by the vendor?
no
differences in the entry: year of commercialization
2010
differences in the entry: GNU/Linux distribution used for the test
gnewsense_3_0_parkes , parabola , trisquel_4_5
differences in the entry: compatibility with free software
B-gold
differences in the entry: tested with the following kernel libre
3.2.6-1-rt, 3.7.1 3.7.1, 3.9.4
differences in the entry: video card model
nVidia GeForce GT335m + GMA 4500MHD
differences in the entry: does the video card work?
yes_with_3D
differences in the entry: wifi model
Broadcom 4353 802.11 ABGN
differences in the entry: does the wifi card work?
yes
differences in the entry: webcam model
unknown
differences in the entry: does the webcam work?
yes
differences in the entry: Description
GPU offloading to the nVidia GPU works with bbswitch and bumblebee with the free nouveau driver. Additionally, you can choose to use the nVidia GPU at all times in the BIOS, however, it has a huge impact on battery life. Bumblebee and bbswitch are suggested in order to get the full battery life, otherwise the nVidia GPU is always running and the fan kicks on more than it's supposed to (it barely ever kicks on to begin with).
Stock wi-fi card used to require non-free firmware to operate. Progress has been made and the Broadcom 4353 802.11 ABGN is now operational under brcm80211(brcmsmac on some debian-based systems). Also the wireless card can be extracted and replaced.
Stock bluetooth card works perfectly without non-free firmware.
Changing the AlienFX keyboard backlighting does not work "Out of the box" on any distribution I know of, however a GPL'ed solution is available here https://code.google.com/p/pyalienfx/ from this gentleman. It is very straightforward to install and configure and I have encountered no trouble with it.
Thusfar, no free boot firmware is available for this machine.
Other than that, everything else works perfectly with a libre GNU/Linux distribution.
[list]
[*]CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3 GHz [/*]
[*]GPU: nVidia GeForce GT335m + GMA 4500MHD [/*]
[*]RAM: 8 GB DDR3-1066 [/*]
[*]HDD: 120 GB Intel SSD [/*]
[*]Screen resolution: 1366x768 [/*]
[/list]
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