Overall Model covered 🔼

This guide cover ONLY DELL Vostro Desktop specific the Mini tower flavors. Must not to be confused with the DELL Vostro Laptops not same.

The desktops used for this guide setup were the Vostro 230 and vostro 250, but all the 2XX and 1XX seires vostro must be covered.

Machine Overall 🔼

Good supported hardware. good overall performance and multicore processor. Lasted model only have USB input devices no serial or PS2 ports. One HDMI out not well detected.

Devuan performance 🔼

Due its multi core processors can be installed any mayor GTK desktop, without performance problems, but for QT cases, KDE4 or KDE5 does not perform very well as expected. Large video files or Databases task there's a impact due disc I/O bus limitations.

Overall Status 🔼

Devuan and any recent Linux at 2017 January, as standard installation coverts without problems all standard hardware, with most of the features enabled.

Overall Devuan status 🔼

Overall install status: 🔼

Devuan at install there's not any firmware so only the live flavor will work. . the other install media will let the system incommunicable. An option its use the USB install way and put the firmware packages in the partition, another its put preformatted the target partition and put the required package there.

At install process if choice standard from start works well.

Configurations 🔼

No mayor fine tune need: Mayor desktop flavors such as MATE, Gnome, KDE, XFce or Cinnamon will autoconfigure the most, and special keys and/or function keys. Only if you will use different desktop, audio and discrete card needs works and fine tune, the networking only need firmware and automatically begin to work. Some misconfiguration with Trinity desktop.

Network 🔼

Unfortunately all the networking devices need firmware. At installation steps with official images, the computer remains uncommunicative after completing install, so its recommended download specific packages for each module or put inside their USB device if you install by the USB way:

Does not support monitor,but supports promiscuous mode.

Audio 🔼

Due the HDMI are integrated and not a separated device like discrete cards, soundcards are well detected in the installation will configure the analog sound card correctly and as primary sound card. But the HDMI will not be heard if not manually selected.

Identify the audio devices 🔼

The sound device are a incorporated HD and HDMI audio device conexant's chipset at leas in last Dell Vostro 250 minitower models:

lspci -vnn | grep -A 9 -i audio | awk '/udio/ || /driver/ { print; }'
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:1e20] (rev 04)
  Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel

Set the audio devices 🔼

If more than sound devices are installed, can be necessary configured. As default in Devuan and for Mayor desktops, the stupid "pulse" framework system audio property select the integrated Intel HD conexant device as general and primary out.

If need configure external PCIe sound card of same vendor this must set in modprobe.d a alsa.conf file preceded by a number, with the proper options to set default analog audio card as primary loaded, the content of the file will be as:

options snd_hda_intel enable=1 index=0
options snd_hda_intel index=1

If other sound vendor, then change the enable and index parameters for each module.

Video 🔼

Comes with Intel IGD integrated, with capable HDMI out, but not well detected:

Identify the video devices 🔼

The primary VGA display are well performed:

lspci -v|grep -A 11 -i ispla |awk '/ispla/ || /driver/ { print; }';lspci -v|grep -A 11 -i VGA | awk '/VGA/ || /driver/ { print; }'
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
  Kernel driver in use: i915

Default Devuan settings 🔼

Devuan installs XOrg modules, mesa modules does not need special firmware:

glxgears -info | grep RENDERER
GL_RENDERER   = Mesa DRI Intel(R) Sandybridge Desktop  x86/MMX/SSE2

External video EGD and modeset 🔼

Using external video card must depends of the video card vendor, and the video card implementation.

Due the configuration hardware only allow single card at one, no mayor configuration are need unless the specific vendor of the external video card.

For the AMD cases the modesetting are needed and seem need explicit enabled, so use the modprobe.d files to do CAUTION: the echo must be do only one time:

echo "options radeon modeset=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/modesetting.conf

THE AMD FGLRX SOFTWARE WAS NOT TESTED COMPLETY

Recommendations 🔼

a) good for develop or server setup its a great hardware well supported
b) good for view and edit video and audio, up to 1024p in video editing
c) opengl for IGD are well supported and most linux games runs perfectly, overall performance
e) not tested well on most exigent games but most emulators runs good.. pcsx2 need external video card