posted 22 Jun 2017
I am not quick to buy new things, though I did replace my Dell Latitude D630 about three months ago with a newer Dell latitude E6440. My plan was to deprecate the machine and put it on a “reserve only” status. In my process of setting up the E6440, I found that I used my D630 still but quite differently, it became my home station machine and my E6440 would be my mobile machine that would return back to “base” where I would have it connect as a client to the D630 for keyboard and mouse. It was a rather nice arrangement.
Unfortunately, the hard drive died on the D630 and I needed to install openSUSE once again on it in order to continue to use my workspace as I have been. What is $50 on a new hard drive to restore my SuperCubicle, right?
This time I decided to go for Tumbleweed instead of the usual Leap install. I was concerned about the need for the Nvidia drivers and a year ago when I tried Tumbleweed on it, it didn’t go so well. The machine would have lock ups, shut down and occasionally get the flashing lights that indicated video failure from the open source Nouveau drivers. The proprietary drivers were at times problematic, even in Leap, but at least stable enough to get work done.
Thankfully this is a Latitude series so the actual process of changing out a hard drive took all of four minutes. The installation of Tumbleweed was also super simple, as expected. I added my Base Application Set to the machine for my multimedia goodies and Smart Card software.
Specification wise, it is nothing impressive, it is quite old. Good at the time this D630 has an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T9500 @ 2.60GHz, 8GB of RAM, 1 TB SSHD, Nvidia Quadro NVS 135M graphics card (known for burning out early in life) with the highest resolution screen available at the time of 1440×900.
I have been using Syncthing to synchronize the files back to this machine. Although it has been slow it has been a problem free experience.
Suspend is seemingly working perfectly. Granted, I haven’t put it through the paces of being a mobile machine but I have tested it enough to say that this feature is reliable enough.
