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Just in case anyone was won­der­ing, Feisty (Ubuntu 7.04) works flaw­lessly on my Dell Insp­iron 6400 now. I posted a pre­vi­ous entry on this topic, back when I installed Dapper (6.06) on the machine and had a few issues getting every­thing working.

The wifi card—Intel Pro Wire­less 3945—works out of the box and is looked after by the restricted driver manager. After Intel kindly opened it’s video drivers, the GMA 945 runs a com­pos­ite desktop (ie. the ‘desktop effects’ or Beryl) without a problem either. If anyone is inter­ested, just for trivial pur­poses, the driver is xserver-xorg-video-i810 and installed by default when installing Ubuntu.

The blue­tooth module and the SD-​card slot work without issue either; plug n’ play.

You will find that upon installing Feisty the screen res­o­lu­tion is still some­thing like 1280x1024 SXGA, wide-​screen res­o­lu­tion. Pre­vi­ously - as detailed in the entry linked above - you had to man­u­ally con­fig­ure 915resolution, but now it’s just a matter of installing it. Thus you have two options. Install it via Synap­tic and restart the graph­ics server (log out/log in) or pop into the tty# ter­mi­nal (press Ctrl + Alt + F1 once you hit the login screen) and log in*.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
It’s a good idea to upgrade first because there might already be newer pack­ages out for things that 915resolution works with (ie. the kernel and xserver-​xorg). Note that this might take a while.

apt-get install 915resolution

This should restart the xserver meaning that as soon as 915resolution is installed it’ll send you back to a refreshed log in screen and your res­o­lu­tion should now be a widescreen res­o­lu­tion. If this doesn’t happen you’ll need to restart the xserver and it’s easily done by restart­ing GDM:
/etc/init.d/gdm restart

* If you need to return to the log in screen at any time just press Ctrl + Alt + F7. Using the same com­bi­na­tion where F(<7) will give you a tty ter­mi­nal (ie. Ctrl + Alt + F3 will give you tty3).