many XPS 13 2015 Developer Edition issues

Super+A software updater should only find one match.

Under Settings... Additional Drivers you should be able to select them.

Worked for me.

Hi Barton, could you please also consider

en.community.dell.com/.../20761601

for this knowledge base (and possibly a bug tracking system).

Looks like the initial setup process is not robust enough to cope with some real-world issues.

In my case it might have been initial problems to connect to my wlan router.

After that I was left with automatically booting into a locked oem account I had no control over.

That did not even allow me to cut a dell recovery media.

Local support has never heard of this issue.

I was only able to proceed because I was able to guess the trivial oem account password.

Excuse any typos as I am typing with Bounce Keys on due to keyboard and pointer bounce issues still present in 15.04.

Thanks for listening!

Hi @Anaran,

Thanks for the input.  I will make sure the team sees this and I apologize for the hassle!

Thanks,

Barton

Hi @Anaran, Thanks for the input.  I will make sure the team sees this and I apologize for the hassle! Thanks, Barton

Thanks!

@Community,

We've been able to publish a document which includes a download for the touch pad concern. See below:

http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN297219/en

This document will be included in the knowledge base that Barton George mentioned.

@Community, We've been able to publish a document which includes a download for the touch pad concern. See below: http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN297219/en This document will be included in the knowledge base that Barton George mentioned.

Thanks!

That article states this is only an issue in 14.04.

Others including me have reported to have these issues in 15.04 as well.

Has the Sputnik team not been able to reproduce this problem under vanilla Ubuntu 15.04?

Are there any dell repos for vidid which you are installing packages from?

That might explain why you don't see the issues in 15.04.

Are there any dell repo paths for vivid that users of XPS13 should be adding?

Local support in Munich referred me to

linux.dell.com/.../ubuntu

but that does not seem to be applicable to XPS13 running 15.04.

Thanks for any advice,

I just received mine (i7/512, DE), and to be perfectly frank I was shocked that they shipped this laptop at all. The trackpad was unusable out of the box. The recovery media software crashed right after I started Ubuntu. Not a great first experience. 

I wiped the drive and did a clean install of Ubuntu 15.04, which I can't even get to run in EFI mode on this notebook. The OS works fairly well for the most part. The trackpad is usable but still has some annoyances which I've more or less smoothed out with synclient options. I also have horrible keyboard repeating issues somewhat frequently, despite running the latest A03 BIOS (it shipped with that). 

The design of this laptop is awesome and I really want to stick this out and wait for some updates to fix these issues (hopefully). I love the screen and the battery life seems good, and it's tiny. However Dell are not making Project Sputnik look very good. This laptop should not have shipped out like this. It was not usable out of the box.

OK, here is my almost entirely POSITIVE experience with the XPS 13 so far.

First, I installed Kubuntu 15.04 on the machine.  Almost everything works out of the box, except for networking. No issues with sound, touchpad, display, suspend.

After an offline download of bcmwl-kernel-source and DKMS networking was working too, with some caveats (machine was freezing when connecting to my TP-Link router, but not with connecting to the Linksys one).  I now replaced the built-in Broadcom Wifi module with the Intel one (costs less then €20), and networking works out of the box as well (and without proprietary driver!).

Personally I simply wouldn't bother with the Ubuntu LTS version.

Software & Updates -> Additional Drivers tab

Ralph - you said you loaded 15.04 and it runs great. I wonder could you get the same benefit by installing & running the 3.19 kernel on Ubuntu 14.04?

If so, this would be simpler, quicker and easier - no need to wipe the disk.

It took me about 10 minutes to install the 3.19 kernel on my desktop 14.04 system and it runs fine.

Here's what I did - 3 commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-kernel-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-vivid

I don't know if this is the "correct" way to do it, but it works.

That said, you are right, it is indeed easy to install 15.04 from scratch.

I got 15.04 booted up into UEFI mode with Secure boot enabled. I followed these directions. www.dell.com/.../en

Unfortunately it does not work if you choose to encrypt your entire volume. I just get put into a grub prompt, and then if i manually boot linux there, I just get to an initramfs prompt. I'm sure I could get further if I had the will power ;)

I re-ran the install, and this time didnt encrypt the volume, just the home folder. Everything works if you follow the above instructions for UEFI mode. 

This is obviously anecdotal evidence, and I've only been using this for about 2.5 hours now booted into UEFI mode running kernel 3.19.0-16, but things seem much smoother. I have not had a keyboard repeat yet, and I don't really know how to explain it, things just "feel" better. It seems more stable. Again, purely anecdotal and very small amount of use so far. But it seems better now than it ever has. YMMV i would think.

I run Ubuntu 15.04 with full disk encryption and secure boot on.

Any instructions available for that anywhere? I followed the directions for getting UEFI mode running however I am just dropped to a grub prompt after I reboot. If I manually choose a kernel and initrd then boot, it goes through asks me for the disk password, then loads drivers, etc but drops me to an initramfs prompt. Seems like this has something to do with the encryption file system mapping since it works perfectly without FDE.