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Upcoming XPS 15 & Linux

S

SniperSlap

Member
I'm interested in hearing about or discussing whether Dell's upcoming 15" XPS laptops with the high res LCDs are going to be well supported by Linux/Ubuntu (13.04 or 13.10).

I think the biggest concern would be if the GeForce 750M ships in an Optimus configuration, which I've heard is a sticking point for Linux.

The touch screen I could probably wait for, but just as a laptop, would anyone here be able to infer or have insights?
 
Got this today and really like t so far. I need to tweak it some to get it working 100% but here is what I have found:

First the good; all the hardware seems to work. I have not tested the Nvidia card yet (installing the driver now).

The bad: the touch screen seems to only work sometimes. It works off a 13.10 xubuntu thumbdrive, but not always (changes with reboot). This is the same for a full install, but since it did work I'm saying it will work more regularly in the future.

Second problem I found is that the sound icon in the indicator applet doesn't work. The sound works and the volume buttons work, just no icon in xfce. This is a problem I have seen before and fixed in xfce.

Lastly I changed the resolution to 1920 x 1080 because a lot of applications are just too hard to read at the full resolution.

Side note: I installed by shrinking the main windows partition and creating 3 new ones (/ swap, and a bootable one), In the bios I changed to legacy and it seems to work quite well. I can change back to the default and boot into windows if I feel I need to (maybe for a bios update as it can be a pain to do it in linux sometimes).

feel free to shoot me questions and I'll report back on Nvidia.
 
Can you guys Update on this thread?


very interested in understanding whether the Nvidia Drivers work correctly and the touch working on reboot.

-Eric
 
mredub said:
Can you guys Update on this thread?


very interested in understanding whether the Nvidia Drivers work correctly and the touch working on reboot.

-Eric
Click to expand...

Touch is currently working, but may just be lucky. I'm using kernel 3.11 and I read that 3.12 has better functionality. They were using fedora.

As far as Nvidia goes I installed nvidia-319 and got a black screen after reboot (this has been reported by others as well). I reinstalled to get to a known state and installed bumblebee. I'm getting an error when I try to use the card. There are newer drivers from nvidia's web site. 331 i believe, and I may be able to fix bumblebee. I will keep you posted.
 
Thanks for the info, Truethug, definitely interested to hear how the video drivers work out. I've been seriously looking at the XPS 15 as an all-purpose, traveling work & play machine--but only if it can run Linux full time.
 
Got bumblebee working by doing this:

only for ubuntu 13.10

sudo apt-get install nvidia-319-updates nvidia-settings-319-updates

Then you need to edit /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

KernelDriver=nvidia_319_updates
LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-319-updates:/usr/lib32/nvidia-319-updates
XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-319-updates/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules
Driver=nvidia

Restart bumblebee

sudo service bumblebeed restart

Unrelated I also found that to pastewith the middle button tap the top right corner of the touchpad. This is the default.
 
Last edited:
Forgot to mention the volume indicator in xfce 13.10 is fixed by editing
sudo su nano /usr/share/dbus-1/services/indicator-sound.service

and change the Exec path to /usr/lib/indicator-sound-gtk2/indicator-sound-service
 
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