13.04 Problems and Suggestions

I also have experienced similar issues, although not exactly the same ones. The wireless is rather buggy and it won't connect to my access point unless I get rather close in physical proximity to the access point. Once connected, I can take it much farther away from the access point and it seems fine. Although Ubuntu on a MacBook Air shows much stronger wifi signal strength from the same distance.

Another issue is the the screen brightness control isn't working at all. I can't seem to control the keyboard backlight, and yes like the author said, the trackpad requires way too many swipes to get across the screen.

When I get to the lightdm (Ubuntu login greeter) screen, I have a black screen and a mouse cursor. It turns out I have the login screen and it's asking me for my password, but I can't see it. If I type the password and press , I can log in to Unity.

Suspend works and so does resume, but I get a black screen kind of like the log in issue. I can type my password and get back to Unity, but this is clearly a bug.

For something supposedly designed for Ubuntu specifically, I'm really disappointed in the number of issues out of the box (after a 13.04 upgrade of course).

Thanks for the info on the black screen. I tried doing what you suggested (i.e. just typing in my password and pressing enter) but it still didn't work. I did this several times to make sure I didn't just mistype my password. However, I found out that if I just wait long enough, the log-in screen does come up. This takes about a minutes and I guess I was never patient enough before. So I still have the problem of the black screen with the error messages, but I can wait for the log screen and not have to reboot the laptop. I hope this gets fixed soon.

As far as wifi, I haven't had any trouble. I'm in a vacation condo right now and I can connect to both routers in our building without a problem. I'm not sure where they are at, but I don't think I'm that close to them.

There is a list of XPS-13 bugs located here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/dell-sputnik/+bugs

 and we're working on trying to get some more resources assigned to have a look at any problems, especially with the 13.04 upcoming release.  A handful of the backlight issues you mentioned may already be filed, although the black screen one when resuming seems to be a new one.   Check the list and see if anything you've hit so far with 13.04 matches what you've encountered. 

Although some of these may not be ironed out by the time 13.04 releases, it is highly possible that they'll get fixed in a Stable Release Update after GA. 

Please feel free to file any bugs at the link above.  That will be the best route to getting your issues looked at. 

Thanks. 

@kb4xley. Thanks a lot for your reply. I took a look at the bugs and will submit my own once I'm sure I understand what's going on. My main problem is the wake-up problem. I did a little more research and it turns out my computer cannot go into hibernate and doesn't even seem to sleep properly. I'm guessing this has something to do with the fact that I chose the full disk encryption option when installing 13.04. Now that the beta 2 is out, I'm thinking of just backing up my personal files and starting from scratch.

Can anyone tell me if full disk encryption is supported for the XPS 13? Have you been able to use this feature? And can you still sleep/hibernate correctly? Thanks!!!

I use full disk encryption on 12.10 and my sleep/hibernate works fine. I'm not sure about the upgrade given all the things you guys are reporting about 13.04.

Lately on 12.10 (the past two weeks or so) I get a LOT of system crashes with my video driver, and lots of other things. I wondered whether upgrading to the beta would fix that stuff or make it worse. It's almost to the point where I also want to back up my system and start over too.

Thanks for the info.  I also have a lot of video driver crashes on 13.04.  They often seem to happen when I Alt-Tab to Nautilus (from any other program). Would you mind letting me know if you used a EFI install? I did a clean install over Win8 using the UEFI bootloader. I'm wondering if maybe I should have switched to the legacy bootloader.

I'm saving my home folder now and I plan on doing a new clean boot of 13.04 beta2 tonight or tomorrow. If I can get sleep/hibernate/resume to work properly, I can live with the other bugs.

Well, I finally managed to do the clean boot of beta 2 (I had problems with booting from USB which I detailed in another thread). Unfortunately, the suspend/resume errors continue. Note that this only happens when the laptop is unplugged and is left in suspended mode for a period of time (at least a few minutes). Also hibernate continues to be grayed out.  I'll continue to update and hope this issue will be resolved before the stable release.

EDIT: A bug report for the sleep / hibernate issue has been submitted. Please upvote it if you're having the same problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/dell-sputnik/+bugs

Any update now that 13.04 is out for general consumption?

Any update now that 13.04 is out for general consumption?

That's a great question. I'd also like to know the answer. I find it too risky to try because the last time I tried it, raring wasn't running well on my XPS 13 at all. Anyone else who's successfully upgraded and finds it mostly working?

Never mind. Sorry for the alarm. I restarted and the sound seems to work again. I would say you're probably safe to install 13.04 at this point. If a few other issues crop up, I'm sure they'll be minor.

Cool, thanks everyone, I'll start the upgrade this evening.

Quick update.

I thought the sleep problem was fixed but, after a couple of days, the problem returned. Also, I though my backlight was fixed, but it turned out it was stuck at 100% and could not be dimmed at all. Battery life was also abysmal under Ubuntu. I'm not sure if other people are experiencing some of the same bugs as me. but I finally had it and went back to Windows for the time being. I'll try Ubuntu again (in a dual boot environment) after I get a larger mSATA drive. 256GB is simply not large enough for me to dual boot (I've got it just about filled as it stands). So, again, I hope I was doing something wrong and no one else is experiencing these issues. Otherwise, sorry I didn't stick it through until I got everything fixed. I just needed a working computer.

Update: Ubuntu 13.04 did NOT fix the problems with our Meraki mr16 access points. It's just as bad as it was before.

Hi

Mine is a L322X:

Here are my current 13.04 issues after fresh install

Hibernation (re-enable by me) broken, although I made the same size /swap partition (sda2 primary /swap 16GB, sda1 primary / remaining space).

I'd like to have information about the ssd LMT256M6M I can't find on the net, although parted reports align-check opt for both partitions "align".

Same difficulties with touch-pad, need more than 1 move to go from left to right ( et vice versa) of the screen and lack of settings.

Wireless sensitivity seems poor.

Keyboard backlight F6 seems OK

Screen backlight F4/F5 broken

And same security issue on boot, black screen on tty7 with 2 errors, and with mouse arrow in all tty1~7, I can login to tty1 (Ctrl+Alt+F1) then tty7 (Ctrl+Alt+F7) appears opened although I didn't even see the Unity greeter and didn't typed my id/password in it, and when then I close the tty7 session (at this time the Unity greeter shows for the first time), the tty1 in which I logged in remains opened.

I re-enabled the zram feature like it appeared on first 12.04 upgrade, although I did it with zram-config which was not installed in 12.04 (in 12.04 upgraded, a single 4GB zram0, in 13.04+zram-config => 4*~1GB zram0 to zram3.

My bios is A08 and ssd Firmware Revision:  DM8110C

Thank you Dell for offering us an Ubuntu compatible machine.