ubuntu-xps-9350.md

My macbook finally went kaput so I've decided to get an XPS 13" and run ubuntu on it. Ubuntu is nice and it mostly works well out of the box but there's a few things I've had to tweak and they're collected here.

PCIe SSD

I had a difficult time installing ubuntu at all because the way the BIOS is set up, the machine boots from a live disk before the SSD is ever mounted. Dell has the instructions for how to fix this:

Users should go to the system BIOS (F2 on boot up) and change the SATA setting to ACHI. Should the drive still not be seen after this change. Users should then follow the instructions below.

Updating BIOS

Instructions for updating BIOS once you install Ubuntu are here

HiDPI screen fixes

Hugo has a good list of fixes here but doesn't address Spotify (despite using a screenshot from Spotify)

You can fix Spotify scaling by (via):

1. find your spotify.desktop file (default on ubuntu seems to be /usr/share/applications/spotify.desktop)
2. edit the line beginning Exec=... to be Exec=spotify --force-device-scale-factor=1.5 %U

Palm rejection

I managed to fix palm rejection by adding the following line to my startup applications:

syndaemon -i 0.1 -R -d

Installing nonfree third party packages

I like nonfree things sometimes and for some reason the software center is incapable of installing .deb files I've downloaded. If that happens the process is an easy (remember that you can open a terminal with ctrl-alt-T)

sudo dpkg -i file.deb

then if you have trouble with that

sudo apt-get install -f
sudo dpkg -i file.deb

This is a good guide in general: http://hgdev.co/install-ubuntu-15-10-on-the-dell-xps-13-9343-2015-a-complete-guide/

Ubuntu 16.04 specific things

Biber and bibtex conflict

I've had a hell of a time getting biber and biblatex to work together. In 16.04 they're installed by conflicting packages which is awful. According to this the best fix is to install biber from source manually (ugg).

I never build perl things so this was something of a learning process. If you're also new, it goes, roughly. Start cpan from the command line. It'll probably want you to configure it if it's your first time. Once you get to a cpan prompt, run cpan[1]> install Module::Build. You can aparently quit cpan with q which is neat. Restart your shell, download the biber repository, extract it, and copy the extracted folder to somewhere that is on your path. Cd into that folder and run perl Build installdeps. And this is as far as I've gotten....

Unsolved

Chrome causes Xorg to eat a ton of %CPU

I have no idea why this is but it happens after a while when running Chrome browser and never happens when I don't.