Linux on the Dell studio xps 13

I'm looking at buying the dell studio xps 13 but i need to run linux on it. Whilst the laptop itself shouldn't have any problems with the linux kernal - I need to know if the multimedia shortcut keys hardwired on the laptop will work under a linux environtment.

Does anyone know anything about this?

/RANT ALERT
I went to a dell store with a livecd but they said I couldn't test it because it would "breach security" . When are these companies going to learn to stop employing people who don't know anything about computers...*sigh*
/END RANT ALERT

 

Those multimedia keys will send special (but standardized) codes when pressed, similar to those additional multimedia keys found on some of the external keyboards. As long as a program can be configured to act on those multimedia keys I don’t see why it shouldn’t work on Linux. Some of the standard multimedia key codes are as follows:

keycode 144 = Previous
keycode 153 = Next
keycode 160 = Mute
keycode 162 = Paly / Pause
keycode 164 = stop
keycode 174 = Decrease volume
keycode 176 = Increase volume

 

Thanks for the reply,

I understand what your saying but then that then begs the question: Is there such a program? Does anyone know of a particular repository I should be looking at or have a name?

So far i've had no luck. The last thing I wanna do is buy a laptop that has defunkt shortcut keys. I mean yeah ok, its not a huge deal - it would still work, but why dump 2.5k on a laptop with, what would esentially be, broken parts?

I need to find out for sure if e.g. Amarok can be linked to these multimedia keys. Surely I can't be the first person in the world looking at a laptop with multimedia keys in a linux environment. Strangely enough its not that easy to find laptops without these inane shortcuts. Well at least ones with decent specs and nifty perks (backlit keyboard etc) anyway.

 

I know Amarok works with the multimedia keys on the M1530, so I'm pretty certain it'd work on the XPS 13. There's an Amarok script you have to run to enable multimedia keys, I think the script comes with Amarok - no extra downloads.

 

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately I just realised something that has stopped me looking at the xps all together. Its hybrid gpu. It works only under vista and heaven knows what would happen if operated under a linux kernal.

So scrap dell - looks like i'm back to waiting for a decent 13" from Asus.

 

There's a guy in the main 1340 thread running Ubuntu (Intrepid) - the first guy who got one, funnily enough. It runs, but yeah, NVIDIA isn't supporting Hybrid SLI in anything except Vista and newer (Win 7) at this stage. So, one graphics card at a time.

 

just a doubt.. where can you choose which gpu to use? and what about if i choose to use the integrated gpu? can i disable the 9200 in order to preserve battery life? (this under linux)

 

none? please help

 

I have fedora linux working fine on my 1340, with the 9400m video. Nvidia's proprietary X server fully supports the built in video. According to the installation guide, 9200m is supported as well: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.29/README/appendix-a.html
There is also a section in there about sli support, see for example the "nvidia-xconfig --multigpu=on" command.

 

it seems a really good news but does it works on this laptop (with 9500m)? because this laptop has hybrid-sli and not sli

 

Hmm, the chapter on SLI/Multi GPU says "Mobile GPUs are NOT supported".
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.29/README/chapter-25.html

So I guess an xps with 9500m option would have to just work as a 9400m right now. I only have a 9400m so I can't test further.

 

Exactly, I looked on the nvidia website and I couldn't even find the driver download for vista let alone linux. You'd have to download it from Dell and some how i don't think you'll find linux support there either.

 

Hey,
I have installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my Studio XPS 1340, and it works fine and gr8, many people complained about suspend wot work and problem with multimedia keys, for me everything works fine, here is my config

core 2 duo 2.53 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 320 HDD, 256MB 9500GE Hybrid SLI Nvidia graphic card

regards
venkat

 

but can you use the hybrid sli? Or just disable the 9200 (like under windows vista)?
last question.. what about battery life under linux? better equal or worse then under vista?

 

I got worse under Ubuntu 8.10.

Only got about 2 and a half hours.

 

Hi all,
I wanted to as you if any extra boot parameters had to be passed to the Fedora Live cd or dvd to boot a GUI. I tried the Fedora 10 64 bit live cd and it wont get me a GUI by default. So I did an X -configure to enable vesa driver and got to a gui in live cd.

But now the wireless did not work in the live cd! How are you guys faring with the wireless. If it works, how are the speeds?

 

What are you talking about? There are a bunch of posts about running the latest nvidia provided geforce driver on this notebook under vista. This one:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_notebook_winvista64_179.48_beta.html

and there is a patch here:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=23072
for the INF that was posted before as well.

You can just use the Dell provided geforce driver of course

and I already provided a link for the linux driver. (Or do you really have some special need to have SLI running too? You don't need it to run X windows).

 

I just ran the install without the X GUI. SHould have been able to get a VGA display, huh? The vga X server did work out of the box with the gparted livecd

My wireless is working under fedora 10, 2.6.27.12 kernel. I don't know what you want to know about speeds. nm-tool says:

Code:

- Device: wlan0 ----------------------------------------------------------------
  Type:              802.11 WiFi
  Driver:            ath9k
  State:             connected
  Default:           no
  HW Address:        00:22:5F:XX:XX:XX

  Capabilities:
    Supported:       yes
    Speed:           1 Mb/s

  Wireless Settings
    WEP Encryption:  yes
    WPA Encryption:  yes
    WPA2 Encryption: yes

  Wireless Access Points(* = Current AP)
    *My-network-name:  Infra, 00:12:1E:XX:XX:XX, Freq 2412 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 32 WPA2

The atheros driver syslogs a bunch of "ForceXPAon: 0" errors. These are supposed to be cosmetic per https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=480429

 

9200... i want to switch off the discrete card!

 

My test was with only the 9400...

Hybrid SLi doesn't work in Linux.

 

It doesn't work but is still enabled and consumes power.. this should be the reason why you got only 2 and a half hours

 

Well there's no way of disabling it then.

 

i hope a day there will be

 

Well hopefully as Linux get's more popular with hardware manufacturers they will support it better.

Until then, I'll use Vista while on the move and Ubuntu while plugged in

 

Is the wifi card, a Dell one? I would have thought it was made by Broadcom?

It uses the Atheros driver? The open source one?

I believe the Dell wifi card is somewhat weak, right? It bugs me that Dell went cheap on the wifi card in the 1340. Why not offer options to configure with the Intel 5100 or (even better) 5300?

Not sure of the quality of screen with these XPS Studio laptops now from reading some posts here on nbr but the XPS Studio 13 (1340) had most of the specs I want except for the crappy wifi card.

 

The only model sold with this laptop is the 'dell 1515' which is an atheros. No, broadcom is the 1510

Yes, see my previous post with output from nm-tool

Weak? I think the atheros is better than the broadcom or intel.

It's an nvidia motherboard you know. I'm not sure if intel wireless has been fully tested with nvidia motherboards. I bet not.

Intel wireless (such as the 2915abg or 2200 I forget) had problems interoperating with access points and dell users who had the broadcom reported that the card caused OS latency problems, so personally I'm pretty happy to have an atheros instead.

 

Ok I finally managed to install Fedora 10 and all is great!
I was wondering though how/where does the IR port show up in linux? I did not see it in lsusb or lspci output. Can anyone try and see where it is!

 

According the nvidia website, that driver doesn't support the 9500M-GE. The closest is the 9500M-G/S. Not sure that the difference is between the G, S and E is though. Note that this thread is for the XPS 13", which has slightly different specs to models that a lot of people are talking about.

 

Hi, Hybrid SLI is not available in Ubuntu 8.10, i manually defined the device info 9400 in xorg.conf file,
regarding the battery life, vista is good than ubuntu

 

It doesn't show up under lspci for me either.
Under windows, without the ITE CIR driver installed, the IR device shows up as unknown, with hardware id: acpi\ite8708
Googling ite8708 provides some hints about how it's a pnp device, but I don't use IR so I'm running out of motivation to track this down.

 

Note that I'm running the above mentioned nvidia driver on my xps 13" with 9400m and it works just fine. Others have posted that with the 9500m they can't turn off the 9200m part (can't disable sli), so it apparently otherwise works fine for them too.

 

The Intel 5300 is 3 antenna and is close to the 4965agn card and is considered an upgraded version.

The Dell card is inferior and although Atheros is good at supporting Linux, it isn't as good a card probably.

I found two sources including one claiming it was a Broadcom card. The info stating it was Atheros showed it as having 2 antenna connectors so I think the Intel 5300 is probably better?

 

Upgraded from what? I still suspect any intel wi-fi cards are not homologated with the mcp79 chipset.

Is inferior or probably is? Any references?

In the US at least, the only choice of wi-fi for the 1340 is the dell 1515 which, again, is atheros.
There are just two antenna wire attachments for wi-fi in the 1340. I've looked inside. You can see them shown in the online service manual if you don't believe me.

 

I' ve got Ubuntu 8.10 on my 1340 with 9500m. I didn't manage to make the nvdia drivers work. Every time I install nvidia-glx-180 from repo and reboot, X doesn't start and i got a "no screen found" error. I can' t figure out how to configure xorg.conf, can you post your please?

 

you should configure your xorg.conf after installing the driver, follow this link to configure

http://venkyms.wordpress.com/

 

Hi, I'm looking forward to buy a Dell XPS m1340 and I want to use linux on it, so I would be pleased, if you (or someone else who knows) could give me some facts about:

- the battery life (in minutes) compared to vista
- the temperatures (idle & performance) (maybe also compared to vista)
- things which don't work with linux atm (eg. webcam)

the most interesting facts are the first ones, because I think the batterylife should be a lot shorter, if the dedicated gpu can't be deactivated properly (and the temp should be higher)

Best regards
shiBBy2k9

further questions:
shouldn't it be possible, that you write a simple tool, which changes the gpu in xorg-config and so introduce a little hybrid-power support to linux?

 

Well, the Intel wifi 5300 is newer than the 4965agn so I thought it was an upgrade.

You are right, the Dell 1515 is 2 antenna and the Intel 5300 wifi is 3 so I would suspect the 5300 offers a stronger signal and I haven't read anything negative about it including in this forum. Therefore, I suspect the Intel one is better.

 

Hi there I am running Fedora 10 64 bit on Studio XPS 1340
Here are your answers
1] The battery life I am getting is about 3.20 hrs with the 9400M card, I dont have the dedicated card.

2]CPU Temps are 43-44 C in idling and about 58-60C in load conditions.

3] All the hardware including the webcam and wireless are working perfect. Even suspend works fine. The sound card had little issues initally, like the speakers wont turn off after I plugin the headphones and no sound would come from the headphones. The issue is almost solved now when I installed the latest alsa-driver-1.0.19. I get sound from earphones and the internal mic works too (for skype!!) , and I have to turn off the speakers manually from the volume control( I have assigned a global shortcut for it from the KMIX menu). Multimedia keys are working too in Amarok.

So at this point , I would say that the linux compatibility is very good with Studio XPS 1340

 

When you say the wireless is working 'perfect', what do you mean if you don't mind me asking? Is it that it connects or you have a good signal? I don't know if you have a level of measure but can you describe the signal strength at all?

Is 60C in load conditions considered high? It sounds high. I guess you can't have it on your lap, right? Anyone know if there is a certain temp that is considered a good compromise for a notebook? We're not going to have any icy cool temps but what is one in which you don't mind it on your lap? Just curious.

The Dell 1340 does sound good for Linux, though. I will consider it. Oh btw, how is the screen? It's not as good as the 1640, right?

 

Thank you for your answers!

But I'm also interested in the battery-life WITH a dedicated GPU inside (that maybe can't be fully disabled by linux). CPU Temp is not great, but ok. Nice question also from the poster above me: Can you use it on your lap? (with dedicated gpu inside)

Best Regards
shiBBy2k9

 

Hi,

The wireless uses the "ath9k" driver in linux which has its little issues like not being able to report current bitrate correctly (it always says 1Mb/s), but I did a file download over the intermet at 1540kB/s speed, so the speeds sure are good. ath9k driver doesnt report the signal strength correctly in linux , as my Vostro with intel 3945 card shows signal as 90% when I am in the same room as my wireless router , but this one shows 52%, but I am not too concerned as only the reporting part is bad, the hardware works great as it should. When I say great, I mean I am getting the same speeds as my Intel 3945 card under Vostro 1400.

Also using the Vostro for comparison, the Vostro CPU (t5470 at 1.6Ghz) is at about 40C in idle and 58-60C under load . SO I guess its similar. Whats different here is that even though the cpu temps are similar for me in both laptops, the XPS is getting a little more hotter at the left upper end than the Vostro. So under heavy load, both the Vostro and SXPS cannot be used on the lap, but for normal browsing n chatting its fine with both.
One thing to note here is that I got the temps on Vostro down after I applied the thermal gel between CPU and heatsink myself , as with the factory fitting , I was getting idle temps of about 46-47C on the Vostro. So I will try the thermal Gel on the SXPS too, as the Dell factory thing seems to be no good. And since I dont have the dedicated GPU, I cannot comment on that.

regarding the screen, I just have one word AWESOME! The LED backlighting is soooo much better compared to the ccfl one I have on the Vostro, the screen is much brighter and crisper on the SXPS 13 , only thing is that you cannot get the high resolution screen which you get in the SXPS 1640, but I am fine with 1280x800 on a 13" screen , as any higher resolution will cause the fonts etc to be much smaller on the screen and strain the eyes.

 

How did you do the x-configure to boot live fedora 10, I'm having problems and want to try Fedora.

 

Yea, I ran the live cd , and it failed to boot in GUI. So on live cd .I got to a terminal by doing ctrl-alt-f2 after it has failed to start X and login as root. Then do X -configure and it will generate a xorg.conf.new in the current dir. Open that file in vi and change driver to vesa in the device section. Now copy this file to /etc/X11 and rename it as xorg.conf

Then do "init 3" , "killall Xorg" and then "init 5" . If it doesnt work, repeat these 3 commands a couple of times. You will get a GUI with GDM . Now just login and you are set. One thing though, if you use the F10 live cd which was released last November or anything before that , wifi wont work. Wifi with ath9k driver started working in fedora only after a bugfix issued in kernel
2.6.27-8-134 i guess .


So wireless wont work in fedora 10 live cd. But after install and a kernel upgrade via wired ethernet and installing Nvidia 180.29 drivers from Nvidia site, all is good.


If you wanna circumvent all this, just get a fedora 10 dvd and do a text based install, its no more difficult than the usual install .

 

Thanks nokiac, your help worked perfect. I learned something new!

 

Hey I am glad it worked for you

 

Hi All:

I am thinking to buy the dell xps studio 16' laptop and just wondering if I can run Linux smoothly on it. I have read this thread and am glad that most of the issues with the 13' version are resolve.d

Thanks

 

Slightly off-topic:

So i've been looking further and further afield for alternatives and found this:

http://www.sagernotebook.com/product_customed.php?pid=160092

It's specs are very impressive - its pretty the much the only laptop that fits (the xps was originally a compromise) my original spec criteria but alas it is 15 inch. No backlit keyboard either though.

Decisions decisions...

 

Does anyone know if the xps 13 with the 9400 gpu is able to run compiz fusion?

 

ohh yea it runs compiz very well!

 

Does anyone have a working microphone with this laptop? Mine doesn't work and I've tried fedora with 2.6.27, 2.6.29.rc8, and even building the latest alsa module on top of either of those (1.0.19 or the latest daily snapshot of alsa). Same result - nothing from the built in mic or mic jack.
If you've got it to work, what version of linux&alsa?
My audio device shows up under lspci -vn as:

Code:

00:08.0 Audio device [0403]: nVidia Corporation Device [10de:0ac0] (rev b1)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0271]
	Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
	Memory at f0880000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
	Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel