Some random notes about several topics
This project is maintained by jgbarah
I got my shinny new XPS 13 9343, with BIOS version A03 (which at this time seems to solve most of the issues that previous BIOS had with Ubuntu). There is a detailed description of the laptops in this family at George Barton’s blog, including the software they have and some other nuisances.
The system came with Ubuntu preinstalled (no Windows, ;-) ). Well, in fact, it came with Ubuntu 14.04 in the hard disk, prepared to be installed, but not installed.
When you power it for the first time , you follow a procedure to install and configure that Ubuntu from what is available in the hard disk. I run through that process. One of the questions you hav to answer is whether you want it to produce some media (USB stick) to be able of recovering the factory version of Ubuntu that comes with the laptop. Unfortunately, I answered “yes”. That caused a lot of headaches.
The problems seems to be a but in the Dell tool for producing the factory-software media is broken. That media is not produced, and what is worse, it leaves some remains (a file or something), that when you run the process again, prevents the process of completing nicely, even after reboots.
The only solution I found was to boot in console mode in the semi-installed Ubuntu (which was installed enough to let me in). Then run:
apt-get install -f
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Fortunately, a new version of the Dell installed came with the upgrade, which let me produce the media with the Ubuntu that came in the box.
As a side effect, Ubuntu seemed now to be completely installed and working, although I didn’t check it a lot.
At this point I was done with Ubuntu, and started with Debian. My intention was to install Debian testing (stretch, as of May 2015).
I started with the very detailed instructions by Eric Mill, with some differences:
The fix to the problem of not booting from hard drive has been renaming the Debian UEFI loader to the default name, as explained in rEFInd (Alternative Naming Options). What I did was in fact not renaming, but copying the Debian loader:
cd /boot/efi/EFI
cp -r debian BOOT
mv BOOT/grubx64.efi BOOT/bootx64.efi
shutdown -h now
Just to be on the safe side, I entered the BIOS (F2 when the Dell logo is onscreen, while booting), and reverted to “factory defaults” the UEFI boot settings.
On the next boot, it booted Debian from hard disk without a glitch.
The screen has a high resolution. There is some configuration to be done so that fonts and applications in general do not appear too small in the screen.
Instructions from Improving Linux HiDPI Support For Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon And Firefox:
entering about:config into the address bar, accepting the warning that appears, and then searching for layout.css.devPixelsPerPx. You can change the value for this parameter all the way up to 2, but I like it most at 1.5 or 1.75.
I use 1.75
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 0
You can also use gnome-tweak-tool, Windows panel, HiDPI window scaling set to 0.
It seems 0 means “scaling should be done per monitor”, which seems better than “2” (that can be used for gsettings, above, too), which means that all monitors will scale by 2. This single change made Atom work like a charm…
The only trouble with Gimp seem to be the icons, fonts for menus etc. are a bit small, but usable. To fix the icons, I downloaded the theme HiDPI.tar.gz, linked from GIMP HiDPI symbolic icon theme. Then, it is just a matter of installing it where Gimp may find it:
cd ~/.gimp-2.8/themes
tar xvzf ~/Download/HiDPI.tar.gz
| And then launching Gimp, and in the menu, “Edit | Preferences | Themes”, select HiDPI theme, ready! |
Fixing consoles (accessed through CTR-ALT-Fn):
sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
I selected 16x32 as a font, which seems to be the largest one.
Following instruction in HiDPI on Ubuntu with a Samsung Ativ 9. generating a new font in 30-point:
sudo grub-mkfont -s 30 -o /boot/grub/DejaVuSansMono.pf2 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf
[ Some errors, hopefully not a trouble, about "Unknown gsub font feature..." ]
Edit /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_FONT=/boot/grub/DejaVuSansMono.pf2
And update grub boot:
sudo update-grub
I own a DisplayLink USB 3.0, to connect VGA and HDMI devices as screens, and to connect to Ethernet. Ethernnet wors, but screens don’t. It seems I need some driver, provided by DisplayLink for Ubuntu, but it seems, despite what I read in their release file, that it does not support Linux 4.x.
More info:
Try the scripts here to properly handle multiple monitors: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#External_displays
Some configuration to enable palm detection, click in pad, and soft button at the bottom; and disable tap to click, which was a bit disturbing to me. The AccelFactor is supposed to avoid repeating keys. The configuration is based on the description found in Touchpad Synaptics information for Arch Linux. The file to add is /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "touchpad catchall"
Driver "synaptics"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
# MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.2"
#Option "RTCornerButton" "3"
#Option "RBCornerButton" "0"
#Option "LTCornerButton" "2"
#Option "LBCornerButton" "0"
#Option "AreaTopEdge" "10"
# Enables Palm Detection to prevent bad clicks
# This seems to work on PS/2, but not on i2c
Option "PalmDetect" "1"
Option "PalmMinWidth" "8"
Option "PalmMinZ" "100"
# Enable clickpad support
Option "ClickPad" "true"
# Sets up soft buttons at the bottom
# First 40% - Left Button
# Middle 20% - Middle Button
# Right 40% - Right Button
Option "SoftButtonAreas" "60% 0 82% 0 40% 59% 82% 0"
# Disables Tap to click
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
# Enable two finger scrolling
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "on"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "on"
EndSection
My laptop enjoys a 250 GB SSD. Although I’m not completely sure that tweeking configuration makes a difference, after some days of use I finally find the time to make some configuration that should enlarge the live of the disk, after recommendations found in SSD: how to optimize your Solid State Drive for Linux Mint 17.1, Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian and elswhere.
Add noatime to /etc/fstab. After it, the line for my ext4 partition is like:
/dev/mapper/expisito--vg-root / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
For now, I didn’t enable TRIM. fstrim does not work out of the box:
# fstrim -v /
fstrim: /: the discard operation is not supported
I suspect this is due to the LVM / crypto layers, but I still didn’t have time to research it.
Sound input (microphone) didn’t work until the kernel 4.1 came in. Now it works. I had to do nothing at all.
The drivers for the Broadcom 216F BT are available in the kernel, but some firmware is needed. It can be downloaded from Miscrosoft website ( Broadcom Corporation - Bluetooth Controller - Micro size USB to Bluetooth Dongle, Last Modified: 6/13/2014).
Once it is downloaded, the rest is pretty simple: extracting the file with the microcode and copying it with the right format in the right place:
% cabextract 20662520.cab
% sudo mkdir /usr/lib/brcm
% sudo hex2hcd BCM20702A1_001.002.014.1443.1572.hex \
-o /lib/firmware/brcm/BCM20702A0-0a5c-216f.hcd
% cd /lib/firmware/brcm
% sudo ln -rs BCM20702A0-0a5c-216f.hcd BCM20702A1-0a5c-216f.hcd
And reboot (so that the kernel can load the microcode).
Information obtained from XPS13 (9343) Ubuntu Linux
It is recommmended to install the Debian tlp package, to save battery power.
The symptoms of this problem that you perceive when using the laptop are various, and it seems that not all the versions of the kernel are affected. In my case, I noticed (and fixed) it with 4.6.4, and my symptoms were that somehow randomly, usually after suspending several times, the broswers and other applicatins seemd to slow down, and at some point even changing workspaces in GNOME Shell was slooow. In some extraordinary cases, the screen became blank. But the most clear symptom comes from dmesg:
% dmesg
...
[ ....] [drm:intel_pipe_update_start [i915]] *ERROR* Potential atomic update failure on pipe A
[similar lines]
The fix seems to be to pass option “i915 enable_psr=0” to the kernel when booting. This can be first tested by (when booting) entering in Grub2 in edition mode, and then adding the option to the kernel line. To make that definite, I added it to /etc/grub/default:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_psr=0"
and then,
% sudo grub-update
See a thread about this problem at ArchLinux.