Tag: Everett

Dell XPS 13, problems with WiFi

A couple of months ago I bought a Dell XPS 13. I’m still very happy with the laptop, particularly given the target use that I have for it, but I have started noticing a list of problems that do bother me more than a little bit.

The first problem is something that I have spoken of in the original post and updated a couple of times: the firmware (“BIOS”) update. While the firmware is actually published through LVFS by Dell, either Antergos or Arch Linux have some configuration issue with EFI and the System Partition, that cause the EFI shim not to be able to find the right capsule. I ended up just running the update manually twice now, since I didn’t want to spare time to fix the packaging of the firmware updater, and trying with different firmware updates is not easy.

Also, while the new firmware updates made the electrical whining noise effectively disappear, making the laptop very nice to use in quiet hotel rooms (not all hotel rooms are quiet), it seems to have triggered more WiFi problems. Indeed, it got to the point that I could not use the laptop at home at all. I’m not sure what exactly was the problem, but my Linksys WRT1900ACv2 seems to trigger known problems with the WiFi card on this model.

At first I thought it would be a problem with using Arch Linux rather than Dell’s own Ubuntu image, that appeared to have separate Qualcomm drivers for the ath10k card. But it turns out the same error pops up repeated in Dell forums and LaunchPad too. A colleague with the same laptop suggested to just replace the card, getting rid of the whole set of problems introduced by the ath10k driver. Indeed, even looking around the Windows users websites, the recommendation appear to be the same: just replace your card.

The funny bit is that I only really noticed this when I came back from my long August trips, because since I bought the laptop, I hadn’t spent more than a few days at home at that point. I have been in Helsinki, Vancouver and Seattle, used the laptop in airports, lounges, hotels and cafes, as well as my office. And none of those places had any issue with my laptop. I used the laptop extensively to livetweet SREcon Europe from the USENIX wireless at the hotel, and it had no problem whatsoever.

My current theory for this is that there is some mostly-unused feature that is triggered by high-performance access point like the one I have at home, that runs LEDE, and as such is not something you’ll encounter in the wild. This also would explain why the Windows sites that I found referencing the problem are suggesting the card replacement — your average Windows user is unlikely to know how to do so or interested in a solution that does not involve shipping the device back to Dell, and to be fair they probably have a point, why on earth are they selling laptops with crappy WiFi cards?

So anyway my solution to this was to order an Intel 8265 wireless card which includes the same 802.11ac dual-band support and Bluetooth 4.2, and is the same format as the ath10k that the laptop comes with. It feels a bit strange having to open up a new laptop to replace a component, but since this is the serviceable version of Dell, it was not a horrible experience (my Vostro laptop still has a terrible 802.11g 2.4GHz-only card on it, but I can’t replace it easily).

Moving onto something else, the USB-C dock is working great, although I found out the hard way that if you ask Plasma, or whatever else it is that I ended up asking it to, not to put the laptop to sleep the moment the lid is closed, if the power is connected (which I need to make sure I can use the laptop “docked” onto my usual work-from-home setup), it also does not go to sleep if the power is subsequently disconnected. So the short version is that I now usually run the laptop without the power connected unless it’s already running low, and I can easily stay a whole day at a conference without charging, which is great!

Speaking of charging, turns out that the Apple 65W USB-C charger also works great with the XPS 13. Unfortunately it comes without a cable, and particularly with Apple USB-C cable your mileage may vary. It seems to be fine with the Google Pixel phone cable though. I have not tried measuring how much power and which power mode it uses, among other things because I wouldn’t know how to query the USB-C controller to get that information. If you have suggestions I’m all ears.

Otherwise the laptop appears to be working great for me. I only wish I could wake it up from sleep without opening it, when using it docked, but that’s also a minor feature.

The remaining problems are software. For instance Plasma sometimes crashes when I dock the laptop, and the new monitor comes online. And I can’t reboot while docked because the external keyboard (connected on the USB-C dock) is not able to type in the password for the full-disk encryption. Again this is a bother but not a big deal.

New laptop: Dell XPS 13 9360 “Developer Edition”

Since, as I announced some time ago, I’m moving to London in a few months, I’ve been spending the past few weeks organizing the move, deciding what I’ll be bringing with me and what I won’t. One of the things I decided to do was trying to figure out which hardware I would want with me, as I keep collecting hardware both for my own special projects and just out of curiosity.

I decided that having so many laptops as I have right now is a bad idea, and it is due time to consolidate on one or two machines if possible. In particular, my ZenBook has been showing its age, with only 4GB of RAM, and my older Latitude which is now over seven years old does not have a working battery anymore (but with 8GB of RAM it would actually been quite usable!), plus it’s way too bulky for me to keep travelling with, given my usual schedule. Indeed, to be able to have something I can play with on the road, I ended up buying an IdeaPad last year.

So thanks to the lowered value of the Sterling (which I won’t be particularly happy about once I start living there), I decided to get myself a new laptop. I decided for the Dell XPS 13, which is not quite an Ultrabook but it’s also quite handy and small. The killer feature of it for me has been having a USB-C connector and being able to charge through it, since my work laptop is a HP Chromebook 13, which also charges over USB-C, and that gives me the ability to travel with a single power brick.

I ordered it from Dell UK, delivered it to Northern Ireland then reshipped to me, and it arrived this past Friday. The configuration I bought is the i7, 16GB, QHD (3200×1800) display with Ubuntu (rather than Windows 10). I turned it on at the office, as I wanted to make sure it was all in one piece and working, and the first surprise was the musical intro that it started up with. I’m not sure if it’s Ubuntu’s or Dell’s but it’s annoying. I couldn’t skip it with the Esc button, and I didn’t figure out how to make it shut the heck up (although that may have been me not figuring out yet that the function keys are bound to special meanings first).

I also found myself confused by the fact that Dell only provided the BIOS (well, EFI) update file in MS-DOS/Windows format. Turns out that not only the firmware itself can read the file natively (after all EFI uses PE itself), but also Dells is providing the firmware through the LVFS service, that you may remember from Richard Hughes’s blog. The latest firmware for this device is not currently available, but it should be relatively soon.

Update (2017-07-26): The new firmware was release on LVFS and I tried updating it with the fwupd tool. Unfortunately the Arch Linux package does not work at all on my Antergos install. I’m not sure if it’s because the Antergos install changes some subtle parameter from the EFI install of Arch Linux itself, or because the package is completely broken. In particular it looks like the expected paths within the EFI System Partition (ESP) are completely messed up, and fwupd does not appear to identify them dynamically. Sigh.

The hardware of the laptop is pretty impressive, although I’m not a fan of the empty space near the top, that looks to me like an easy catch for cables and ties, which make me afraid for its integrity. The device is also quite denser than I was expecting: it’s quite heavier than the Zenbook, although it packs much more of a punch. The borderless screen is gorgeous but it also means the webcam is in the bottom corner of the screen rather than at the top, likely making it awkward to have a videocall. The keyboard is a bit tricky to get used to, because it’s not quite as good as the one in the ZenBook, but it’s still fairly good quality.

By the way, one of the first thing I did was replacing the Ubuntu install with an install of Antergos (which is effectively Arch Linux with an easier installer). This did mean disabling Secure Boot, but I guess I’ll have to live with it until we get a better idea of how to do Secure Boot properly on Linux and full-disk encryption.

Once I got home, I did what I do with my work laptop too: I connected it to my Anker USB-C dock, and it seemed to work alright. Except for some video corruption here and there, particularly on Konsole. Then I started noticing the lack of sound — but that turned out to be a red herring. The answer is that both the on-board speakers and the HDMI audio output are wired through the same sound interface, just appear as different “profiles”.

It wasn’t until I was already compiling webkitgtk for an hour that I noticed that the laptop wasn’t actually charging, and I thought the problem was with the dock. Instead the answered turned out to be that the HP Chromebook 13 charger is not compatible with the XPS 13, while the Chromebook Pixel charger worked fine. Why the difference? I’m not sure, I guess I need to figure out a way to inspect what is seen by the USB-C bus to figure out what the problem is with that charger. It should not be a problem of wattage, as both the HP charger and the original Dell charger provided with the laptop are 45W.

Speaking of the USB-C dock, there is a funny situation: if the laptop boots with it connected, and the lid closed, it does not appear to return the monitor on (all is fine if it boots with it disconnected). Also, it looks like the default DM provided by Antergos only shows the login page on the laptop’s screen, making it hard to log in at all. And in the usual mess that multi-screen support is with modern Linux desktops, Plasma needs to be killed and restarted to switch between the two monitors. Sigh!

As for the screen corruption that I have noted earlier, it seems to be fixed by one of these two options: upgrading to Linux 4.12 (from Arch Linux testing repository) or changing the compositor’s setting from OpenGL 2.0 to OpenGL 3.1. I think it may be the latter but I have no intention to try this out yet.

It looks like I’ll be very happy with this laptop, I just need to figure out some new workflows so that I don’t feel out of place not having Gentoo on my “workstation”.

Also, to keep with my usual Star Trek host naming, this new laptop is named everett after the (non-canon) USS Everett, which is the same class (Nova-class) as my previous laptop, which was named equinox.