Unboxing the XPS 13

Question

We are a software shop evaluating the XPS 13 running Ubuntu 12.04 for development machines. First off I am used to my Lenovo so the attention to detail of the XPS was very appealing. Even the box that it ships in is slick.   Enough about the aesthetics... - First thing I noticed was the advantage of having the SSD and when booting I am at the login screen in <10 seconds. Fast!  - I initially had some issues with the wifi driver. A little research revealed that the 'iwlwifi' driver for 12.04 can be flaky for 802.11N so I recommend disabling N. - I had no issue installing and running our development toolchain, (java, gcc, node) and with the XPS  I was able to  build and debug several of our system components simultaneously within eclipse. It was also great to see applications like Skype and Spotify to running on Ubuntu 12.04.  - This is a solid machine performance-wise. Certainly the storage is not a limiting factor as my workflow typically does not involve storing a large number of files locally. It would be great to beef up the memory a bit in order to get a few VMs up and running as I would like to be able to do cross platform builds on a single machine. Here is how the machine stacks up against my Lenovo W520 for our internal C++ builds. Keep in mind that the W520 has 4 cores + HT and not 2 + HT like the XPS 13. W520 time make -j8 >> /dev/null  real    0m17.551s user    1m52.259s sys    0m9.569s XPS 13 time make -j4 >> /dev/null  real     0m36.927s user     2m9.380s sys     0m10.105s - I agree that the touchpad needs to be disabled while typing. There are countless times that hitting the touchpad interfered with keystrokes. In the office I have been using synergy for mouse and keyboard sharing with my primary machine so this is not that big an issue. I was however able to at least two finger scrolling enabled which certainly relieved some of the touch pad pain.   All in all my experience with the XPS has been positive.  The form factor is great and you really feel that you can take this thing anywhere. It also has enough under the hood to be a formidable development machine.

DELL-Mario L · Answer

Thanks for the nice feedback!

It sounds like you got the kernel with the updated touchpad driver no problem since you have two finger enabled.

Are you still encountering issues then even with the check box checked to turn off the touchpad while typing? That should help with a majority of the problem.

amastracci · Answer

I have noticed that the driver works a majority of the time but there are still cases where I get the a mouse click while typing. Is there anything I can do to debug this issue? See which cases cause the driver to disable the touch pad. I'd like to help the project along. Also is there a release date for the Ivy Bridge XPS 13/14/15? Will there be an Ubuntu release for that version?

Linux General

Was this post helpful?