14.04LTS support

Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't EOL until April 2017: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

That aside, Dell's Linux teams' (server and client) policy is to, whenever possible, upstream hardware enablement (HWE work so that we don't have to keep maintaining special driver packages and so that all distributions benefit. (Basically the only time this doesn't happen is if a component vendor refuses to provide anything but a binary driver.)  With the Haswell XPS 13, because of timing, it happened that both the most recent 12.04 point release and 13.10 didn't have all the HWE work that was done for the system. However, 14.04 should contain those changes.

The latest Ubuntu 14.04 installed flawlessly on my dell xps laptop with haswell processor. everything works fine. 

Hi, 

I also have an XPS 13 + Ubuntu 14.04 (up to date) but I found that the two finger scrolling is not yet available.

Is it working for you ?

++

Laurent

Yes. It works. 

You might have to blacklist the i2c_hid driver. I did this in 13.10, so I didn't have to do anything else in 14.04. Check the previous posts on how to do this.

Since I expect to receive my laptop after the official release date of 14.04 I am planning to dispense with all prior releases and just install the latest and greatest from external media (USB stick). (Particularly since I wish to opt for full-drive encryption while the 12.04 LTS installer apparently only features home folder encryption.)

How should I go about handling this issue? Should I just install as normal and then blacklist the i2c_hid driver as you suggest?

Hi All, 

Thanks you NAUMRUSOMAROV.

As you said, if blacklist i2c_hid driver, the laptop is working correctly.

All Hardware switches work perfectly and I can configure the touchpad to enable two finger scrolling directly from the ubuntu settings panel.

Cheers,

Laurent

I'm using the test build and the touchpad is not recognized as a touchpad, thus I can't turn on "Disable touchpad while typing". Is this working for others?? If not, what needs to be changed

This comment expains a workaround:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1265885/comments/21

Can you tell us if you did fresh install or if you upgraded previously configured 13.10? Thx! (trying to decide how to upgrade, now that I got 13.10 working with all features)

I did a fresh install because I was jumping several version (12.04 -> 14.04) and because the host was brand new (just arrived the day I installed it), I had nothing on it that I needed to keep other than the original restore media.

I tried an in-place upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04 and ran into problems.

First, the computer booted straight to a memory tester. I think this was due to having a Grub default to set to "2" instead of "0", so that Grub was actually working, but the boot options had changed, and it was automatically booting an option I didn't want without prompting.  

Once that was addressed, the computer now boots to a black screen with a cursor. I can get into the OS using the recovery mode. I blacklisted "i2c_hid" for good measure, but it didn't help.

Help would welcome getting past the black screen when booting. Thanks!

My boot problem also turned out to be of my own creation as well. My 14.04 install had gotten hung, perhaps related to some customization I had done to support Perl development. I had cancelled the upgrade, leaving the system in what turned to be rather unstable state. I thought I had that all taken care of,  but apparently the "ubuntu-desktop" package had become uninstalled at some point. 

Today, I used the tip of updating the boot line in grub to remove the "splash" and "quiet" options, which gave me the glue that X wasn't starting.  By doing a "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" from text mode, I fixed all the missing packages and the system booted after that.

In summary: If you haven't customized your installation before your in-place upgrade from 12.04, you shouldn't run into the problems I did, and I don't think they would affect fresh 14.04 installs. 

For the sake of conversation, I’m also writing to report that I received my XPS13 two days ago and yesterday I settled down with Ubuntu 14.04 on a USB stick and began a tabula rasa installation - this is either gutsy or stupid, depending on your point of view (and perhaps both simultaneously).

Anyway, I must report that it has been a largely painless experience - yes there has been lots of frustration because I am migrating from one platform to another (I have been a Mac power user for the past eleven years) - but the hardware support and OS installation has been the least of it. Everything worked perfectly out of the box, even though I apparently went out of my way to make things difficult for myself (such as insisting on whole-disk encryption, as mentioned, plus adding a bunch of SSD and TLD optimisations to the system early on).

The only thing that marginally bit me in the bum was the trackpad driver, but once I blacklisted that it almost instantly became eminently usable.

I am very impressed.