www.dell.com/.../EN

There's no advice there about how to handle partitioning. Is it recommended that 15.04 be installed to the large ext4 partition, leaving the small OS and DIAGS partitions intact?

Also, I just booted the the 15.04 image on a flash drive and found that the wifi card is not available. Is that a temporary issue that will go away, or does this indicate that if I install 15.04 I'll lose wifi?

All help appreciated,

Martin

For anyone else in the same position as me: I followed these excellent instructions.

Before you start, run the Software Updater, click on Settings / Updates, and at the bottom "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version", choose "For any new version".

Then follow the instructions on the page; it worked perfectly for me, and at the end everything's working including the wifi (Broadcom chip in mine), and the touchpad.

Two methods here, with a big difference.

Dell's instructions enable you to do a clean install of 15.04 from scratch. If you want, you can repartition the disk to recover some extra storage by removing the little OEM Dell partitions, shrink the swap to something reasonable.

The link to askubuntu site does an in-place upgrade from 14.04. It's not exactly the same as a clean install from scratch. The advantage is it doesn't wipe the disk, so it preserves your data. The disadvantage is that in-place upgrades aren't always as clean as a fresh install.

If I were getting a new XPS-13, I'd do the Dell procedure clean install. If I already had mine configured with a bunch of data, I'd do the in-place.

Yes, I agree. I had done some setup initially that I wanted to keep (mainly installing and configuring Gnome and some apps for hidpi), so I was glad to find a route that allowed me to keep all that. If it had gone wrong, I would have done the clean install. I may do that eventually anyway at some point. I was a bit worried about losing wifi with the clean install, because mine has the Broadcom chip, and some people had reported a problem there.

Looks like I'll soon get a chance to do the clean 15.04 install.

Today, Dell sent a support guy out to my office to replace my keyboard (I've been having a lot of spurious/repeat chars). My XPS-13 died in surgery in his hands. Now Dell is sending me a new one.

Good thing I had my data backed up. The component that fried seems to be the SSD.

Dear MRC01, when you do the 15.04 clean install would you mind doing another incredible post as you did for the 14.04 setup (http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/4613/t/19635794). I find your writing very clear and detailed and I highly appreciate it!

After I messed up my install (rolled up to the 3.19 kernel, then tried to go back), I ended up doing a fresh install of 15.04 with an AMD64 image. I followed the Dell instructions linked above. I created my bootable flash drive using Ubuntu's Disk Image Writer (found in the Open With submenu when right clicking on an .ISO file).

Ubuntu 15.04 seems to work better than 14.04 with the 3.19 kernel. With the stock Broadcom/Dell wireless card, my Bluetooth doesn't work properly. I've yet to test the Intel 7265 card that others report is fully functional. The touchpad starts to show issues after a few sleep/resume cycles, but they are cleared up with a reboot. I've found that a very quick tap of a key will induce the key repeat issue, but solid presses don't. Either way, I've disabled key repeats in the keyboard settings and haven't had an issue since.

My fan runs when plugged in, possibly caused by heat from the on-board battery charger (not the transformer/power supply in the cable). When charging, the left side of my XPS 13 warms up. It cools off when the battery is done charging and the fan shuts off.

I get a solid 8 hours of work from my battery (1080 non-touch, 256 GB SSD) with keyboard backlight off, screen brightness ~50%, and music playing from a Youtube playlist in the background. Pretty good in my book for an i5 processor. Dell's 15-hour claim, I think, includes runtime from the power companion.

Thanks for the details, Mr. TSolar.

Looking at Dell's instructions, they do not mention installing the broadcom driver.

Can you confirm that when you did the fresh install of 15.04, you did not manually install any broadcom driver? I don't actually care about bluetooth so that's fine with me. But the wireless works fine?

I had the machine online through a USB tether to my phone, so it may have installed the drivers then (I had the options selected to automatically install drivers). There were no manual installs that I had to do. WiFi works fine.

I don't have the XPS with me right now to tell for sure if it did download proprietary drivers.