15z

Revision 51 as of 2012-05-02 09:02:34

Clear message

Introduction

This page should give you all the information you need about running Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 15z laptop. XPS 15z works fine with Ubuntu, read this whole guide before start installation.

Installation gotcha's

  • Boot installer with pcie_aspm=force acpi=noirq i915.semaphores=1 (to access boot options press any key when the purple screen with human=keyboard appears.) << WHY do you need all these options? acpi=off is enough to install, no idea what the semaphores and pcie have to do with the installer. Will be removed if no good explanation is provided.

  • USB installation: booting with an USB 2.0 storage on the USB 3 slot works to direct installation.

Hardware Support Matrix

Natty 11.04

Oneiric 11.10

Precise 12.04

Keyboard

Works

Works

Works

Screen

Works

Works

Works

Ext. Screen (HDMI)

Broken*

Broken*

Unknown

Ext. Screen (Mini Displayport)

Works

Works

Works

Wired ethernet

Works

Works

Works

Wireless ethernet

Works

Works

Works

Trackpad

Works with manual changes

Works with manual changes

Works in mouse emulation mode

Sound

Works

Works

Works

Optimus

Works with manual changes

Works with manual changes

Works with manual changes

9-in-1 card reader

Broken

Works with manual changes

Unknown

Webcam

Works

Works

Works

* The HDMI is physically connected to the nVidia card -- by manually changing the xorg.conf, it is possible to start X on the nVidia card only, getting the HDMI video (at the cost of inactive main laptop screen and the Mini Displayport output).

Hardware

Boot options

Add to the grub boot line the following options

pcie_aspm=force acpi=noirq i915.semaphores=1 << You DO NOT need pcie_aspm=force and i915.semaphores=1 in 12.04 IIRC. Please provide some kind of reasoning/links/... to this change or it will be removed.

To keep these options edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg, carefully.

Optimus / Graphics cards

Bumblebee and nvidia-current driver

With 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M Graphics Card with Optimus installing nvidia-current drivers from restricted drivers causes the loss of compositing. Moreover running nvidia-xconfig crashes X on the next reboot (fix it with sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot). This happens because you need Bumblebee to make it work, more explanations follow the suggested procedure.

The Bumblebee stable PPA and more information about this subject can be found in Bumblebee.

As an example, using Bumblebee, it changes battery rate from 1900+ to around 1600 for me (verwilst). The current rate (with disconnected charger) can be tested using:

grep rate /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

9 in 1 card reader

Download the drivers at post #10 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1718934 uncompress the file, open a terminal and cd to the uncompressed directory and type

# make

and then

# sudo make install

reboot

Trackpad

Full multi-gesture trackpad usage does not work at this moment.

A latest kernel update seems to bring basic functionality out of the box, therefore the following procedure won't be necessary.

It is however possible to get basic mouse functionality with the following command:

# sudo rmmod psmouse; sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps

( Or use proto=bare or proto=exps ).

To make this persistent, add the following line to a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ (/etc/modprobe.d/options.conf could be an option, but modprobe parses all the files in that directory):

options psmouse proto=imps

Fix various glitches

The following fixes are needed to boot correctly after installation. Otherwise the laptop will freeze before login screen.

For a first boot hit e on the first option while on grub screen and add the following commands to the boot sequence just after "quite splash".

pcie_aspm=force acpi=noirq i915.semaphores=1

To make it persistent add pcie_aspm=force acpi=noirq i915.semaphores=1 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub.

Then run the following command:

# update-grub

And reboot. This fixes ACPI issues, lowers power consumption and 1-2 second regular freezes of your video card.

Wireless connection

Wireless connection can be seldom hard to bound or discontinue, it depends on power management settings.

A script named wireless and located in /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d fires PSP when the pc is running on battery. If you want to override this setting create an empty file named wireless into the folder /etc/pm/power.d/.

In some cases PSP can be triggered also by other events like stand-by. If this is your case add the following lines to /etc/pm/power.d/wireless

#!/bin/sh

/sbin/iwconfig eth1 power off

Anyway power management can be always manually turned on or off by giving the following command on terminal

sudo iwconfig your lan name power off or power on

USB 3 mass storage

If your USB 3.0 mass storage device is not recognized, even for fdisk or lsusb, you can try blacklisting the USB Attached SCSI module. Add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

blacklist uas

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics

Trackpad

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1108661

Information on Bumblebee (for graphics card Optimus support)

Wireless

Power saving polling issues on Official Dell Forum

How to disable PSP on Ubuntu