XPS 13 (9343) Ubuntu Driver Installation Problem

Same here with brand new XPS 13 with pre-installed Ubuntu 14.04

Linux 3.13.0-37-generic #64bdw1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Sep 25 14:01:25 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

There is actually Ubuntu 15.04  realesed which I tried also installing / upgrading. There is more support with 15.04 but still this computer is not compatible with Ubuntu out of the box.

The Ubuntu Software Center app included an update of the Dell Driver Installer app last week. The updated app will install XPS13_A08.fish.tar.gz OK.

The last Dell Driver Installer didn't work for me, using Ubuntu 14.04.3 ISO. Same python problem.

You may want to uncompress the tar.gz and have direct access to all the individual files .deb

They can be installed one at a time with $sudo dpkg -i filename.deb

The synaptic .deb files might work.

Hi,

is the driver package only for 14.04 or can it be used with 15.04 also?

I'm still having trackpad issues under any 15.04 flavor and with any actual kernel.

Tried fresh 4.2 today - still unusable trackpad.

Best,

 C.

Has anyone found a solution to this?

Same problem here

Hi,

as i kind of hijacked this thread i crossposted here, since there is more traffic:

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/4613/t/19650961

Honestly @Dell am i missing something obvious here?

@Dell this is a decent piece of hardware planned to be a "MacBook Air" Killer, having hardware that simply isn't well supported under linux. I never had the repeating keyboard issue, but BC WifFi costing hours of configuration and lots of kernel panics. Furthermore an simply unusable Touchpad.

I saw theres a windows firmware update for the trackpad. is there an pendant to this for linux, is it needed or does the kernel 4.2 bringing in the firmware?

Can or do i have to install the firmware with a Windows PE Stick?

how can i diagnose weather it is a hardware defect?

After 4 months i'm getting uncomfortable now,

 C.

I was having this issue with my M3800, specifically trying to install the drivers under Ubuntu Gnome 14.04.3

Eventually I was able to fix the problems and get the drivers installed and this is how: 

1) create user named oem, so sudo -i; adduser oem

2) within the your python dist-packages, there's a dell library and in it there's a file called recovery_backend.py. The path where this existed for me was /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/Dell/recovery_backend.py. On line 839, it should read: with open(os.path.join(deb_dir, 'Packages'), 'w') as wfd: change 'w' to 'wb'. Save and close this. (You will need superuser permissions to do this)

3) within the same dist-packages folder there will be a file called driver_gtk.py and on line 232 it should read if type(tid) == dbus.UTF8String. If the version of the python dbus lib you're running is <.8 then you need to change dbus.UTF8String to dbus.String.

Finally run the driver installer and things should install. The problem at hand seems like a mismatch in the python library dependencies. The issue could probably be solved by updating some of the deps, but I don't know - was too lazy to figure out which versions were needed. If any developers for Dell are reading this, it would probably be prudent to deploy software like this in the future using a virtual environment.  

It worked for me, thanks! 

I forgot to mention, I also had to update tlp to get rid of some powersave errors. That should be fairly straightfoward though. 

This is very helpful @ast4... However, for folks who are not so python savvy, can i ask a couple of questions?

- why do we need to create an oem user?

- how do i tell the version of my python dbus lib. I have a bunch of dbus-xxxx programs install on my machine, but am not sure which one will tell me the version number of the library

- what program in the dist-packages folder is the actual driver program i need to re-run (driver_gtk.py?) and how do i run it? (I just tried 'python driver_gtk.py' in the dist-packages folder and it complained 'Import Error: No module named Dell.recovery_gtk' even though there is a recovery_gtk.py file in the same directory) 

1) The dell scripts, IIRC a few shell scripts, login as a user called 'oem'. If you try running the installer without the oem user these scripts will fail throwing an exception indicating that there is no user named 'oem'. In my eyes it was much easier to simply create a user named oem rather than updating the scripts with my username. 

2) Just fire up the python interpreter and execute 'import dbus; dbus.__version__'. It's important to note, for mine at least, the libraries were installed into my python3 library. So make sure you're using your python3 interpreter and not python2.x (not backwards compatible). You can attempt to update your dbus library too, I think you may have to compile from source though as the last time I checked installers like pip could not handle dbus. 

3) If I'm understanding you correctly, you shouldn't have to run any of the scripts to install the drivers. I didn't really spend much time examining their code, but if I had to guess the python scripts are mostly functions which is all driven by the gui, which was probably done in QT or something, and the install is a sequence of commands. Simply run the gui and install like normal.

Now if you'd like to test if the code updates actually worked and assuming those scripts are just class/function defs. Then your issue is likely that your default python installation is running on python2.x. You can verify this by running 'which python' and if it's not pointing to /../../python3 then that is most likely your issue. That being said I wouldn't recommend changing your default python over to 3 quite yet, that will break quite a bit of other stuff. You could either pass the entire path for your python3 binary (e.g. /bin/usr/python3 somepy3code.py) or you could update the shebang of the python3 code to point to your python3 location and chmod it to executable. 

Hope that was helpful. 

looks great - i'll try and do this over the weekend and ask again if i have more question. many thanks.