My first week with the dell xps 13 Developer Edition 2015 (DE)

Did you also have the issue of a locked oem account after running the initial configuration after first powerup?

Hi,

I faced similar problems as you can find them in this forum:

- creating recovery after first boot crashed

- dependency issues

- really bad touchpad behaviour, especially when you try to point and click with two fingers

So today I went and installed 15.04 as Barton George kind of suggested in his blog. After changing the bios to secure boot i get the nice grub selector to choose method of booting from USB Stick. Before that, I always got this message:

Missing parameter in configuration file. Keyword: path

gfxboot.c32: not a COM32R image
boot:

and had to type the way i wanted to boot.

After the installation the system would not boot into the freshly installed ubuntu. only the live stick was recognized as bootable partition. The use of boot-repair under ubuntu live fixed that. The necessary proprietary drivers for the wlan module were installed. I used tethering over my phone to access my network. I guess you could also use a USB to Ethernet adapter.

So now with 15.04 everything seems fine, especially the touchpad reacts the way it's supposed to, no glitching and the use of one finger moving the pointer and the other one klicking works fine. So my recommendation is to update to 15.04. The reasons are explained in Barton's blog.

Another thing I noted: Before I began installing 15.04. I made the recovery bootstick with the dell tools. When my other boot stick, with the image from ubuntu.com wouldn't work anymore (who knows why), I tried using the recovery stick, and that one also ran on 15.04 instead of 14.04.2 like I would expect.

I'm agree with your sentence of how hard it is to make this computer just usable.

The worst thing for me is there are no response from dell team on this forum (and as you say, it is useless to try to contact your dell local support). They sometimes put a comment on Barton's blog but here we are alone. No official bug tracker, no wiki.

A customer has created a github repo just to report issues:

https://github.com/advancingu/XPS13Linux/issues

I hope you can understand that the engineers involved in the project (myself included) have limits to how much time we can spend answering questions and troubleshooting on the forums before they stop being able to do their actual jobs or become burned out (or both).

That said, we're working on getting the appropriate Dell support and social media teams to more consistently be responsive here, but it's not a substitute for talking directly to Dell support.

Hi Jared,

I hope you can understand too that I have bought a 1500€ computer for its linux support and the first setup crashed, the usb hub proposed by dell does not work, the local team support is useless, I had to reinstall the system after a dist upgrade and I spend a lot of hours to have a working machine (almost: the trackpad is still glitchy and the keyboard sometimes repeat keys).

So take no offence but if you had published all infos on what is working or what is not working on a public place (like bugtracker) you would spend much less time answering questions in this forum. It is not normal that a customer had to create a github repo to follow issues on a service we have payed.

If it was an open source project, I could be more indulgent, but I have paid for that linux support and I feel very lonely facing to all my problems.

Domak: Yes, I can definitely understand your frustration. Like I said, we're working on fixing these communication issues. Given Project Sputnik's origins, we didn't start off with these resources in place, so this is one area that has been a challenge for us.

the local team support is useless

It would really help us if you described what specific issues you've had with Dell's support staff, such as:

• How did you try to contact Dell's support staff?
• What did you communicate?
• What exact response did you receive?

So take no offence but if you had published all infos on what is working or what is not working on a public place (like bugtracker) you would spend much less time answering questions in this forum. It is not normal that a customer had to create a github repo to follow issues on a service we have payed.

Of the issues you mentioned, we weren't aware of them beforehand, and we've attempted to document them, but you're correct in that it hasn't always been in the same place.

If it was an open source project, I could be more indulgent, but I have paid for that linux support and I feel very lonely facing to all my problems.

You indeed paid for support. As I understand, all Developer Edition systems come with Dell ProSupport for a minimum period of one year. You are able to exercise this support contract. If you are having issues with ProSupport, you should escalate. I'll note that one of the quickest ways I've found to get help (aside from calling support) has been by utilizing our social media channels: . This forum is not an official support forum, but we are working on improving the monitoring of the forum by our social media teams.

Hi anaran, I do not have the issue of the oem account.

I just bought the Developers Edition in Germany, I got it with MS Windows. When I called support they told me it was a sales problem and they were currently all in vacations. So they suggested me to install it myself, what I did. I install Ubuntu 15.04 and had several problems with the WiFi driver, but I finally could solve them, just to notice that the Display functionality on the Docking Station D3100 doesn't work at all!!

Could you please let me know when is the D3100 going to be supported on Linux?

Cheers! 

It appears that there is a new Linux driver for the DisplayLink chip on the Docking Station D3100:

www.displaylink.com/.../ubuntu.php

http://www.displaylink.com/downloads/ubuntu.php

I installed the driver and everything I tested seems to work, usb, audio, and  hdmi display, i did not test the network adapter.

The problem now, is the amount of resources needed to compress the video signal, the displaylink process alone is using 50% of the processor for a single fullhd display , I don't know if this is a bug or the expected behaviour. When using the hdmi dock output the fan is always on during non demanding activities like normal internet surfing, and  watching a hd video through the dock display is frustrating because of the poor refresh rate.

I don't know if the windows driver behaves this way but I unistalled the dock and I'm not using it. I'm not going to waste half of the laptop resources continually only to output the video signal.

I installed the driver and everything I tested seems to work, usb, audio, and  hdmi display, i did not test the network adapter. The problem now, is the amount of resources needed to compress the video signal, the displaylink process alone is using 50% of the processor for a single fullhd display , I don't know if this is a bug or the expected behaviour. When using the hdmi dock output the fan is always on during non demanding activities like normal internet surfing, and  watching a hd video through the dock display is frustrating because of the poor refresh rate. I don't know if the windows driver behaves this way but I unistalled the dock and I'm not using it. I'm not going to waste half of the laptop resources continually only to output the video signal.

If you haven't yet, I recommend reporting this on DisplayLink's forum.

I have upgraded my 2014 XPS 13 to Ubuntu 15.10 and now the D3100 usb monitor dock is working flawlessly.  Please see this thread for more details:

en.community.dell.com/.../20840994

Everything is still going great, with only one tiny snag to a smooth experience with Ubuntu 15.10 on the XPS 13.  After a suspend/resume cycle, the wifi will fail to reconnect 4/5 times.  To fix it, I've defined a small alias:

    alias wifitoggle="nmcli r wifi off ; sleep 1 ; nmcli r wifi on"     # toggle wifi off/on to re-init after sleep

So now, when I wake up the computer and the wifi doesn't reconnect, I can just type "wifitoggle" at the command prompt and in 4-5 seconds everything is reconnected (this is much faster than using the mouse to disconnect/reconnect).

Alan