Flash with sound seems to have worked out of the box too. I had to install the Dell sound driver but then it also ‘just worked’. I used my previous instructions to get the edgers version of the NVIDIA drivers (not the ones on the Dell site), Optimus was already disabled and the NVIDIA drivers ‘just worked’. Next I followed the instructions here to get access to sound and the touchpad (on the fresh install the ‘pad worked but had no side-scroll, now it has side-scroll).
Running ‘uname -a’ reports that this is 32 bit: “Linux ian-Latitude-E6420 2.6.35-30-generic-pae #54-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 7 20:28: i686 GNU/Linux” I made sure to reload the package list (via Synaptics) and let it fetch updates. I formatted the partition too for good measure.
Installation took 20 minutes, it allowed me to use the previous ext4 partition (I had to edit it using the advanced configuration and set the ext4 partition’s mount point from blank to ‘/’). Having hacked away with Natty Narwahl for a few weeks I’m regressing to the 10.10 distribution provided by Dell here.