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.

Hello.

Since I have just ordered a Haswell i7 XPS 13 Developer Edition due to be delivered sometime in the second half of April, and since I desire to enable full-disk encryption right from the start, I was hoping to start tabula rasa with a 14.04 installation which should be in general release by then.

Now that the final beat is available, can somebody confirm that it installs ‘flawlessly’ in the sense of enabling all on-board hardware (eg audio, trackpad etc) and providing desirable services (eg low power consumption, sleep/hibernation etc).

I personally believe it would be uselessly time-consuming to complete the 12.04 LTS installation (which, I am told, does  not provide an opportunity to enable full-disk encryption) to be then required to overwrite it almost instantly with the newer release.

So basically, if I can be reasonably sure it will work fine as soon as I install it, I’ll go right ahead and do so…

Thanks for any replies I may receive on the topic. 

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