Thanks for summering and dealing your experience with in this forum.

I went the same way as you, but when I tried to install Ubuntu 15.04 I run into the non booting problem. To just get into the PC I had to recover the system. I used the recovery disk that have made based on Dells original installation just for making a new try. I had updated the BIOS to A04. I had even bought the Intel wifi card 7265 but not installed it.

To my surprise after using the recovery disk using kernel 3.13, still having the Broadcom wifi+BT and installing Dells latest improvement file. I have got a well working PC. So I stop making improvement and are very pleased – even the bouncing keyboard has disappeared. Wifi and BT works fine, so I will keep my Intel board in my draw to the coming upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 next year.

Hello, 

thanks for sharing your experience. 

I'm having the same exact problem when trying to install Ubuntu 15.04 (booting problem). The think here is that, for some reason, i'm not able to restore the system using the recovery disk. It seams that the hidden partition used for restoring, got corrupted as well. Do you have any ideas about it ? 

Thanks

I'm not sure if this can help you. I just changed the boot choice to my DVD-drive  by pressing F2 when the Dell logo showed up and run the recovery disk I have made in before hand. The rest just took it's time. In the end you have to go back and change the boot set up again to the boot section on your hard drive.

I didn't used the restoring partition because it was corrupted as you say.

I went the same way as you, but when I tried to install Ubuntu 15.04 I run into the non booting problem. To

I never installed 15.04. I installed kernel 3.19 on Ubuntu 14.04. Some people reported problems upgrading from 14.04 to 15.04, others reported problems wiping disk & installing 15.04 from scratch. Ubuntu 15.04 works better on the XPS-13 mainly due to having kernel 3.19, so I simply installed that and avoided the OS upgrade/install.

I followed the exact same procedure you described (thanks for the post), ran upgrades, updated kernel, changed wifi card, blacklisted modules... and everything now work like a charm apart for the bluetooth.

Bluetooth is definitely detected:

1: hci0: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no

the applet says it's on, but I cannot connect to any device (I tried my phone and a set of speakers). It just searches for device but finds none.

Any advice on that? Thanks.

Thank you for such a nice and detailed post. I'd be very interested if someone had a similar post for those who want to go the way of doing a clean install of 15.04.

To MRC01:

Your posts were very helpful. I followed most of the steps you described. As far as I understood you did not apply the Dell's patches. Do you know if they would do something good/bad for the 3.19 kernel? I actually did apply them to that kernel (hoping to get an improvement of the wifi-suspend issues) and noticed no change.

If you run kernel 3.19 (or Ubuntu 15.04) you don't need any of the Dell patches.

Barton confirmed this in his blog announcing the release of the developer edition, that you can install Ubuntu 15.04 and everything works with no patches. The patches are only needed if you're running 14.04 as shipped by Dell.

When my new XPS-13 arrives (still waiting for warranty replacement after tech killed my XPS-13 while trying to replace the keyboard), I'm going to (A) install the Intel wireless card, then (B) slick the disk and do a clean install of 15.04.

That's how Dell should be shipping these machines: with 15.04 and the Intel card. This would save them and their customers so many hassles.

Thank you for sharing your works to make XPS 13 usable. Could you please add info / extend your blog post for making BT working? It currently states:

>  You can patch the WiFi driver, and extract the BT firmware from the Windows driver, and install it on Linux. I did all that but it still didn't work like it should. Once you sleep, BT is gone forever - it won't work when you wake.

I don't use sleep/hibernate so this would not be a problem for me. But I do use BT devices a lot.
Could you share a script how to do the extract BT firmware and on patch?
Thanks