17 R5, i9, Ubuntu? Linux?

I've had a promising, though not perfect start with Ubuntu 18.04. Audio, graphics, WiFi are all working. I wonder if the presence of two GPU chips (Intel on the CPU and the discrete Nvidia card) is causing the system to black-screen when sleeping and when sending the display to sleep. Also, in the Display Manager, the CPU is under heavy load, but this disappears when logged in. I used a separate SATA SSD for the Ubuntu installation, with Windows on the as-supplied M.2 internal SSD.

The laptop is very large - quite a monster - you have to do some serious hefting in return for the processing power.

Hope that's helpful.

Update: The touchpad didn't work, and I couldn't get a stable install of Ubuntu 18.04, so it's not going to work for me for now, which is a shame. Until someone gets this hardware to work on Linux, I'll have to use the bash command line environment on Windows 10.

I dual boot windows with gentoo and everything works except touchpad lights so it should work on ubuntu to

I found out why I was having problems, and now have a successful Ubuntu 18.04 installation on my Alienware 17 R5.

By default, the BIOS is set to treat the internal disks as "RAID", even though the default Windows installation that I had was not RAID mirrored or anything. This caused problems; the Ubuntu installer was able to run ok, but when it wrote to my SATA SSD, the system was subtly corrupted and would not run correctly (slow operation on login screen, random crashes and so on).

I found a link somewhere on the web to suggest that I change the BIOS setting from "RAID" to "AHCI" and then the Ubuntu installation worked first time. NB: Before changing this setting, I set Windows to boot in safe mode (with networking). It all worked fine, and I now have a dual boot Alienware monster!

This was the reddit link which suggested the RAID/AHCI BIOS setting that needed changing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/8qfqh2/linux_boot_usb_doesnt_see_the_m2_drive_alienware/

The only remaining issue is that, for me, the touchpad didn't work after the installation, although the touchpad light DOES come on.

I'm also not sure I have the correct wireless driver, as the wireless access has been intermittent, but it seemed to work flawlessly in the installer, so I suspect I need the correct wireless driver, possibly a proprietary add-on.

Oh, forgot to add - for me, the touchpad didn't work after the installation, although the touchpad light DOES come on.

This was the reddit link which suggested the RAID/AHCI BIOS setting that needed changing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/8qfqh2/linux_boot_usb_doesnt_see_the_m2_drive_alienware/

###Touchpad
#https://fzheng.me/2017/05/11/fix-touchpad-ubuntu-1604/
sudo su
echo 'blacklist i2c_hid' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
depmod -a
update-initramfs -u

#wireless
#https://askubuntu.com/questions/1016903/alienware-17-r4-ubuntu-16-04-wifi-driver
sudo apt-get install gcc
sudo apt-get install make
sudo apt-get install git
git clone https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/iwlwifi/backport-iwlwifi.git
cd backport-iwlwifi
make defconfig-iwlwifi-public
sed -i 's/CPTCFG_IWLMVM_VENDOR_CMDS=y/# CPTCFG_IWLMVM_VENDOR_CMDS is not set/' .config
make -j4
sudo make install

I have the AW 15r4 i9 based laptop, and it so far is working great with linux. the only thing I have had to do out fo the box is what was already posted for the touchpad.

###Touchpad
#https://fzheng.me/2017/05/11/fix-touchpad-ubuntu-1604/
sudo su
echo 'blacklist i2c_hid' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
depmod -a
update-initramfs -u

For me almost everything works, the only thing is that i cant change the color of the lights.

I dont know why its not a AlienFx for linux.

I have a Area-51m with an RTX 2080 and a i9-9900K running ParrotOS on the M.2 NVMe drive and windows 10 running on the 1Tb SATA SSD with Ubuntu successfully running on the second NVMe.

Pretty happy for all you who have successfully installed Ubuntu or Linux on a Alienware laptop.

Hi @WichoAnaya

Can you share any resources you used and the steps you followed?