The first thing I did was update the BIOS. There have been some low-level security issues in the press recently, so I figured I should start with the latest base. This was easy: I booted into the installed Windows, logged in, and went go to http://dell.com/support. From there I entered my service tag, clicked on downloads, and selected the BIOS. As I expected, the installed BIOS was a few months older than the latest one. I'm glad I didn't try to install this under Linux, though I assume there is a way to do so. It was a simple process of clicking the obvious choices, and then it rebooted and completed flashing.
Now the challenges began.
This is my first laptop without a CD/DVD drive (unless you go back to the floppy days). So to boot Linux, I needed a bootable USB flash. I had followed some very complicated instructions to set up a flash drive, but then found that I had much better results by simply taking the Gentoo live CD and using 'dd if=source_file.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=8192k' to copy it.
So it should be simple to boot from the flash drive, right? Wrong! Windows set up a "fast boot" where it bypasses most of the BIOS, including the part that watches for holding down F12 for the boot menu. After some searching, I found that you need to enter "control panel" in the Windows search thing that replaces the Start menu (this is my first time to ever run Windows 10). From there I used one of the control panels to disable fast boot. Even with that, it took several tries to get it to recognize the F12 for the boot menu--it checks it very early in the process and moves past it very quickly.
So I booted the Gentoo USB, and started following the installation guide. I've done this before, so I wasn't expecting too much trouble, but I did have some surprises. First, I wiped the partition table and set it up for Gentoo. I chose to use 1GB VFAT for the EFI partition that is also used as my /boot partition. When everything is good, I'll only mount it to copy over new kernels when updating. Most of the rest of the drive is my root partition, for which I selected ext4. The last 64GB I used as a swap partition, which is excessive, but I hate running out of memory and having the OOM killer sacrifice the one thing I wanted to keep alive.
At this point, I found that I had no network. This is my first modern laptop without an ethernet port. It came with three different USB-C dongles that I could use, one is just ethernet, one is ethernet, video, and USB, and one is essentially a docking port with lots of ports on it. What I quickly learned is that USB-C isn't like traditional USB. USB-C is the connector, but it can use several different protocols over that connector, including PCI, in which case the marketing name is Thunderbolt. None of that was working in Linux. More on this in a bit...
So for the time being, I tried copying over stuff using a second flash stick, but that didn't get me very far. I found an old regular USB ethernet dongle, and that worked fine. Once I set up my kernel to boot from EFI, everything should have been mostly good, but of course it wasn't. I had to go back and forth between booting from USB and failing with my kernel. This was a challenge because I couldn't get the F12 menu to come up once I had wiped the Windows partition. I ended up switching back and forth between legacy and EFI booting in the BIOS; legacy for USB and EFI for my attempt at my installed kernel. This probably wasn't necessary, but it worked to get me past the problem. (I needed to go into the BIOS anyway to tell it to boot the grub loader from EFI instead of Windows.)
Getting the system to boot natively was a huge pain. Part of the problem is that after the boot completes, Gentoo clears the screen for the login prompt, so you lose the boot messages. I decided to fix this by commenting out the getty command for tty1 in /etc/inittab. Now I have to switch consoles to log in, but I can always see the last screenful of the boot. I eventually got my installed kernel to work. It turned out that I had failed to configure tmpfs, and Gentoo fails the boot process miserably if it can't put a tmpfs file system on /run. This is what I get for configuring my own kernels--a bit of pain, but I always learn things.
So I finally dived into the problem of the Thunderbolt devices simply not working. The main problem was again the BIOS. It was configured with security options for Thunderbolt. This is a good idea--without security, any device plugged into that port can do anything it wants with your computer. But for setting up Linux, it's not a good idea, so I turned off all the security options. I would like to turn them back on at some point, but I'll have to do some research to see if and how Linux handles Thunderbolt security.
Issues
Now I'm able to get the system up and running for the most part, but I'm still having some issues. I'll document each one here:Issue:
Switching from X back to a console works, but then moving back to X doesn't
Solution:
Need to load firmware as mentioned in https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Intel
Switch acceleration from Sandybridge New Architecture (SNA) to UXA
Setting 'Option "DRI" "False"' works--switching is consistent, though there's an 8-10 second black screen when switching back to X.
Issue:
The trackpad works fine in the console as long as you don't want to do a right or middle click. If you're used to using gpm, you can't do cut-and-paste operations or anything else requiring a middle or right mouse button.
Solutions:
I have not found any solution to this problem.
Issue:
X has no middle-click on the trackpad.
Solutions:
You can set the logical location of the middle button to be in the middle of the bottom of the trackpad with the synclient command. Unfortunately, this doesn't help with gpm on the console. I added the following script to my X startup script:
#!/bin/bash eval $(synclient -l | egrep '(Left|Right)Edge|RightButtonAreaTop|MiddleButtonAreaRight' | sed -e 's/ //g') if [ "${MiddleButtonAreaRight}" != 0 ]; then echo Middle mouse button already set up exit 0 fi # The order here is critical or it will be rejected: synclient RightButtonAreaLeft=$(( RightEdge - (RightEdge - LeftEdge) / 3 + 1 )) synclient MiddleButtonAreaRight=$(( RightEdge - (RightEdge - LeftEdge) / 3 )) synclient MiddleButtonAreaTop=${RightButtonAreaTop} synclient MiddleButtonAreaLeft=$(( LeftEdge + (RightEdge - LeftEdge) / 3 ))
You can play with that to get the buttons to work however you like. I chose to have three equal buttons, and I didn't play with the other settings, but you can look at the output of 'synclient -l' to see what all you can fiddle with. Do note my comment about the order. You can't have overlapping buttons, so I had to be sure to shrink the right button before defining the middle button (the left button is implicit, so you don't have to adjust it).
Issue:The Thunderbolt devices work fine if they're connected when the system boots. If you unplug and replug them, the system sometimes needs a kick to rescan the PCI bus:
echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan
Takes care of it usually. However, after several repeated disconnect/connect cycles, the PCI scan fails, and it can't use the device.
Solution:
I don't do a lot of disconnecting/reconnecting, so I haven't dug any further into this.
Kernel Config
Getting the kernel config right for all the devices can be tricky. I'm old fashioned enough that I configure my kernel with support for exactly the devices I use, avoiding modules as much as possible. I'm noting here some of the drivers you'll want to be sure to include:Trackpad: From dmesg, I see it's a SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad.
Ethernet: The dock uses a Realtek 8153 USB ethernet chip.
Sound: The WD-15 dock uses a 0bda:4014 Realtek USB audio device
Touch Screen: It has an Elan touchscreen. Select the "HID Multitouch panels" driver under "Special HID drivers" in the kernel configuration. It's working, but I haven't tuned it. At some point I may want to investigate, and this looks like a promising guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Calibrating_Touchscreen
WiFi: It has an Intel 8260 chip, which uses the iwlwifi driver It also requires firmware. I used this guide: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Iwlwifi
Bluetooth: It has an Intel 8087:0a2b USB Bluetooth device. I configured it so that the kernel recognizes it and is happy, but I don't have a wireless keyboard or mouse, so I may not use it anytime soon, but I'm thinking about using it for audio. The only catch was that before it would connect to my Amazon Echo, I had to tell it, "Alexa, pair with my phone." A volume control shows up with "alsamixer -D bluealsa." The guide I used is: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Bluetooth
Video: It has both Intel and Nvidia graphics, but unlike some laptops, you can't just ignore the Intel and use the Nvidia graphics--you have to access the Nvidia through the Intel GPU. So you can't install the Nvidia drivers without first installing the Intel drivers.
Flash Reader: It's a Realtek RTS525A PCI device. It requires the kernel to be built with CONFIG_MFD_RTSX_PCI and CONFIG_MMC_REALTEK_PCI. Unlike my old laptop, the card sticks out when inserted, so I can't leave an empty microSD adapter in the laptop.
WebCam: I haven't looked into using the webcam.
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