Dell Latitude E5570

Oxygen, the Lenovo G50-80 laptop, is showing erratic behaviour. The screen starts blinking like crazy when the screen is dimmed to 80% and also at random moments. Seems like the 'super sturdy Lenovo' is just chinese crap, like the majority of things produced there. The machine will keep running, but I lost confidence in it. The other day the screen flickering started at powerup. And then disappeared when I switched to GUI mode.

So I started looking for something else. In general I am very fond of Dell Latitudes. Until now I have only been buying used Latitudes since a Dell Latitude is a good buy, even when used, even when it's close to 10 years old. Nowthatsit sell very nice used Dell Latitudes (5xxx series and up) for 700 - 1200 euro's.
And then I came to my senses: why buy a used Latitude for €800 when I can buy a new one from the 5 series for €600?
So I bought myself a new Dell Latitude E5570 from www.alternate.nl in Barendrecht which was quite affordable at €639. OK it was last years model but it still is brand spanking new and it is very fast compared to the Lenovo Crap-o-matic.

Fluor has been running with a 4.9.40 kernel from Aug 2017 until Sep 2020. Rockstable apart from the WLAN connection. A few weeks ago I managed to build my own kernels and tested things on my other machines.
Now I compiled a 4.9.237 kernel, optimized for the i3 CPU, and installed it. The system is slightly faster but the frequent WLAN dropped connections are gone. Wrong. They're still here...
Read all about it in the Kernel-4.9.237 page.

At first I wanted to have a way better CPU than the Lenovo's Core i3. I've looked at i5's, pentium quad cores, AMD 12 cores but in the end I settled with the i3 again, although the Dell has a much faster i3. Hdd is equal in capacity but way better in properties (WD Black in the Dell, Seagate Momentus in the Lenovo).

	Dell E5570	Lenovo G50-80
CPU	Core i3 6100u (Passmark 3000)	Core i3 4005u (Passmark 2500)
HDD	500 GB WD Black 7200 rpm	500 GB Seagate Momentus 5400 rpm
Screen	15.6" 1366x768 matte	15.6" 1366x768 glossy
Optical drive	None	DVD writer
Battery	47 Wh internal	28 Wh external
Keyboard	Backlit good keys, US layout	Sloppy unlit keys, US layout
Feel	Dell	Cheap chinese crap
Function keys	Very well readable	Fxx keys unreadable
Mouse buttons	Two plus three	Two

The old dilemma: I paid for the windows that came with the machine. But I will never use it. So I thought: "What if I buy a fast SSD for the M.2 slot, flip in an old 160 GB HDD in the HDD drive bay and keep the Windows laden HDD for other purposes? Well, the E5570 supports an M.2 connector and a SATA connector but there is not enough space to store both. You need to choose between an M.2 SSD or a SATA HDD. Which leaves me with a new Adata 128 GB SSD.

Inside the E5570 is a Western Digital Black 7200 RPM HDD. Fast and reliable. No concern for wearing out sectors. I decided to keep the HDD. The windows is just a special tax. I will accept my loss and wipe it out with a big smile on my face.

I decided to do one test: see if the machine is not too modern for Linux. I downloaded Linux Mint 18.2 iso, made it a hybrid and burnt it to USB stick. It booted right into Mint and all ran fine. Windows partition is dead meat.

I want to keep my favorite compilers mocka and obc but that's not a problem. Both are still available in tgz packages and are easy to install from scratch.
I also want to keep as much of my typed texts. No problem either: they're all in one subdirectory.
The big question is: would it be better to copy the full '/home/user/' directory tree from oxygen towards fluor? How would that impact some or all of the newer window managers and programs? A tough question.

But after studying the files in my home tree, only few directories are worth saving. Only the '/home/user/.mozilla/' tree is important to keep intact so as to keep all the bookmarks, passwords and history. So I simply copy the mozilla tree and discard all the other dotted directories. That saves a lot of work. And it just works.

Of course I make regular backups with a script:

bash bin/backuphome jan
cat bin/backuphome    

tar caf /home/data/jan/$1.tar /home/$1  \
        --exclude=*cache*               \
	--exclude=*/Bld/*               \
	--exclude=*electricsheep/*      \
	--exclude=*avi                  \
	--exclude=*mp4                  \
	--exclude=*tmp/*

I make a backup tar file, put it in /home/data/jan, and everything is in it except cache files, dummy files, temporary data and movies

The E5570 is a Dell and a Lattitude. So very predictable when it comes to setting up the system setup area. Just boot the machine, wait for the DELL logo to appear and press F2. Seconds later you're in the system setup. First thing to do is to disable secure boot. Then save and reboot and enter setup again.

Next change the boot sequence and enable the legacy roms (same screen). Next select the boot medium such that USB is in the topmost position. Save and reboot. You're good to go now.

I downloaded the latest Slackware current source tree on Oxygen, created an iso with 'the script' and made a USB image out of it with 'isohybrid'.

Below is a copy of 'the script'. I didn't make it, I copied it off a CD or source tree or something similar.

mkisofs -o /tmp/slackwareCurr-dvd.iso \
  -R -J -A "Slackware Install" \
  -hide-rr-moved \
  -v -d -N \
  -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
  -sort isolinux/iso.sort \
  -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
  -c isolinux/isolinux.boot \
  -m 'source' \
  -V "SlackDVD" .

Make sure you are in the slackware tree, in the directory that contains the file 'ANNOUNCE.14.2'. Then issue the command

bash slackinst.sh

and find the bootable DVD in the /tmp directory. Make it a USB image with

isohybrid slackwareCurr-dvd.iso

Copy the USB image to the USB stick with

dd if=slackwareCurr-dvd.iso of=/dev/sdx

where the 'x' is the name of the USB stick.

Now insert the newly created USB drive in the Dell's USB port and power up. Just do a full install, as usual. I formatted the 500 GB disk in

60 GB root
400 GB home
6 GB swap

all in primary partitions.

As mentioned above: I want to keep my mails, browser data, personal files and technical data. I used the tar ball from the last backup to restore the .mozilla tree and other dotted directories. But I used an ftp connection to move over the data from oxgen to fluor.

I started an ncftp connection on fluor with oxygen (the Lenovo, soon to be retired)
Make sure the local and remote directories are /home/jan and then repeatedly issue the command
```
get -R directory
```
to pump all data over from the old system to the new. My tar ball backup does not store pictures and movies.
As soon as the majority of the system was pumped over, I edited /etc/inetd.conf to enable the proftpd server on the new fluor. Next I setup an ftp pipe from oxygen to fluor to 'put -R directory' since, for some silly reason, I could not GET these files.
I logged on as root on oxygen, created a 'pump' directory in '/home/jan' and copied all special files, that were not in '/home/jan' to it.

It took some time but I think I have transferred all I wanted to keep. After this, I moved along some data on the new system so that the data profile on the new computer is more consistent.

Below are the lines I changed in order to get the FTP server running:

# Professional File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server.
ftp     stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd  proftpd

Save and exit file. Now, as root, issue the command

/etc/rc.d/rc.inetd restart

and the FTP server is running.

Just download the wicd package from the 'extra' section on the CD. Install, make executable and run it manually first time:

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.wicd
/etc/rc.d/rc.wicd start

Choose a network and you're done. Either use the commandline version or the GUI version (in xfce or kde) to get wicd to choose a connection. There seems to be an XFCE wireless client but I chose for the wicked wicd.

Later on I logged on in my router and added a fixed IP address rule. The MAC address of the E5570 is now always coupled to 192.168.56.9 The majority of my peripherals and computers has such a DHCP rule. It prevents surprises after a blackout period.

I first installed LibreOffice 5.3.4 but I thought it made some errors while sorting a big spreadsheet file. So I removepkg-ed it and installed some older versions. Neither of which ran. At first I thought removepkg made a mistake and removed a few files too many but soon I learned that 5.3.4 needs newer libraries and there is no such thing as backward compatibility in the libboost_system software. So I reinstalled 5.3.4 and all is good again.

In seamonkey I chose for Apply Theme -> Seamonkey Modern which is optimized for the recent 16 : 9 screens. The controls and buttons are shorter and lower such that there is more space for webpages. I like it a lot.

Although the E5570 should have a backlit keyboard, I cannot control it. On my other latitudes Fn-RightArrow cycle through the three backlight states. On this machine Fn-RightArrow = 'End' but Fn-F10 should do the trick. Unfortunately this does not work. The F10 key also has no icon on it. So now I am in doubt: is this really a backlit keyboard?
So now I am looking to find a way to control the backlighting with a program that issues ioport commands. Any help is appreciated.

Although promised by Dell and Alternate, thi machine did not have a backlit keybored. I bought one separately on Ebay. I still have to replace it, after 4 years.

Early 2025 I installed the backlit keyboard that I aquired in 2019 or so. It was not easy to detach one of the flatcables; apparently there was some soup in the connector. But after some gentle cursing the cable could be removed. After booting, the system immediately saw the backlit keyboard and could use it. Nice. I should have done it much earlier.

I used both of these methods, but perhaps one would have been enough:

Start a browser and go to https://localhost:631/ and follow the instructions. In my case:
- supply a URL (socket::/192.168.56.107)
- choose HP
- name it 'K5400'
- upload a ppd file
- print a testpage
Done.
Start the HPLIP device manager, press the green button (add device), supply the IP address, do some more consmetic editing and let the software do the rest.

The HPLIP printer is more versatile than the CUPS version. It lets me collate 4 pages on one sheet. Among other things such as a status display of the ink cartridges.

Probably THE most important part of the GUI is the terminal emulator. I like two the most:

Konsole
Xfce Terminal

But standard, these behave like dumb terminals. No color highlights and no path in the prompt etc. In earlier versions I used to have a simple prompt defined in ~/.bashrc but it was very simple, not what I was used to from using a plain terminal. The solution came from making the terminal emulator read /etc/profile like so:

------ .bashrc -----

. /etc/profile

alias lls='ls -lh --color'
alias cls='clear'
alias mcc='. /usr/libexec/mc/mc-wrapper.sh'

which does the trick very neatly.

All of a sudden I could not read doc files anymore. And I could not open older odt files. And I could not open a new text file. Once I got the following error message:

And no matter what I tried, LO would not open text files anymore. So I uninstalled 5.3.4 and upgraded to 5.4.1 without any differences. On advise of an online friend I rediscovered Open Office. I downloaded the files from Slackbuilds.org and installed OO (after removing LO). And now everything works again.

After having set up OO and editing a first file, I wanted to print my prose. Impossible. No printers detected, although I have a CUPS and an HPLIP printer. No matter what I tried: no printer appeared in the printing dialog. Searching on the internet resulted in a warm feeling: I wasn't the only one with that problem.
I finally managed to solve it by defining a systemwide default printer via Applications -> System -> Print Settings although I am pretty sure I set K5400 as CUPS default.

As user 'root' I ran the setconsolefont script and changed the defaul font to 'ter-918b.psf.gz'

#!/bin/sh
#
# This selects your default screen font from among the ones in
# /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts.
#
setfont -v ter-918b.psf.gz

In itself this was an easy job.

Open the machine
Disconnect the battery
Disconnect the SATA cable FROM THE MOBO leading to the HDD
Remove the HDD screws but take care: the HDD connector remains on the drive
Place the SSD retainer clip
Insert the SSD and mount the fixxing screw

Easier said than done, since the retainer clip is a pure unobtainium. Luckily you can make one for free

I cut a piece of rigid foam, but 3mm, 1/8", of plywood or cardboard is also good
Loosely place the plate in the bottom left of the chassis
Mount the SSD in the connector
With a sharp pencil mark where the mounting hole for the screw needs to be
Remove the SSD and the plate
Drill a 3mm (1/8") hole in the wooden or plastic plate
Mount an M3x8 metal screw through the hole, apply a thin washer and an M3 nut and screw down the nut
Check if the SSD is not too high or low when it rests on the M3 nut
Adjust if necessary
Fix the screw/nut with acrylic glue (10 seconds glue)
Make sure the screw is not too high; it should steer clear of the bottom lid.
Now glue the plate with the M3 screw on it in the right corner (I use pattex 100%)

Now you can mount the SSD. Suitable plates range from plywood, mdf, rigid foam, brass, bare pcb material, cardboard.

Most of the pictures are shrunk in size. They double in size when loaded seperately. You are not an idiot. This is how I did it. It is not perfect, but it works. Now you make your own. Cheerio.