Dell Inspiron 1525 Notebook

Linux Compatibility:

While Dell has been offering Ubuntu Linux on some of their desktops and notebooks targeted at consumers since 2007, our Dell Inspiron 1525 didn't arrive with Linux. Instead there was Microsoft Windows Vista Premium with Service Pack 1, which was quickly wiped and replaced with Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64.

Overall, the Dell Inspiron 1525 worked great with Ubuntu 8.10. The only real compatibility problem we had run into was with the notebook's integrated web-camera not working with GNOME's Cheese, but that is a known Ubuntu issue between Cheese and the uvcvideo driver. This web-camera had, however, worked "out of the box" with Skype. The 802.11g WiFi, Intel HD audio, volume control buttons, and other areas of this Intel notebook had all worked fine with this latest version of Ubuntu.

Linux Performance:

We have already used this Dell Inspiron 1525 in two other articles -- Intel Linux Graphics Performance Q4'08 and Java Performance: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista. Beyond that we also used the Phoronix Test Suite to carry out some additional Linux benchmarks for this article.

We compared the Dell Inspiron 1525 with its Core 2 Duo T5800 processor and 3GB of RAM and Intel GMA X3100 graphics to that of a Lenovo ThinkPad T400 notebook. The ThinkPad T400 was equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 at 2.80GHz, 2GB of DDR2 memory, 160GB SATA hard drive, Intel GMA 4-Series graphics, and a 1440x900 display. The Lenovo ThinkPad T400 and Dell Inspiron 1525 were both running Ubuntu 8.10 with the same set of packages. Of course, the hardware is mostly different between the two, but is appropriate for gauging the performance between the two notebooks and different Intel mobile processors.

Among the tests we used with the Phoronix Test Suite were OpenArena, QGears2, GtkPerf, timed ImageMagick compilation, parallel BZIP2 compression, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, GnuPG file encryption, IOzone, OpenSSL, RAMspeed, Sunflow Rendering System, and Java SciMark 2.0.