So after endless effort to get Elementary OS to work, I later decided to switch to Ubuntu MATE instead. Kind of similar to the Elementery OS desktop, but with all the newest kernels and patches. Now my Dell XPS 13 runs smoothly, and everything is working. Finally!

Anyway, as promised, here are a collection of fixes I configured Elementary OS with.

Touchpad issues

As we stated in the previous post, the touchpad was working really bad. After reboot it acts normally. Then, after several minutes of moving windows around it starts acting differently. When the left button is pressed with the pointer at the top of a window, touching the pad would move the window around (in the direction of the touched point on the pad). This makes moving the windows across the screen (several strokes on the pad while keeping the button pressed), as well as extending windows, difficult.

The touchpad uses Synaptic drivers, but they are not patched properly to work with the Dell. Several guides, and forum discussions says that the libinput drives works after som configuration. The problem is that you can’t install libinput on Elementary OS because of dependencies issues.

root@XPS-13:~# dpkg -i /home/daniel/Downloads/download_2015-10-12_03-41-50/home/daniel/Dell/xserver-xorg-input-libinput_0.14.0-1_amd64.deb 
Selecting previously unselected package xserver-xorg-input-libinput.
(Reading database ... 167300 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../xserver-xorg-input-libinput_0.14.0-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking xserver-xorg-input-libinput (0.14.0-1) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of xserver-xorg-input-libinput:
 xserver-xorg-input-libinput depends on libinput10 (>= 0.21.0); however:
 Package libinput10 is not installed.
 xserver-xorg-input-libinput depends on xserver-xorg-core (>= 2:1.16.99.901); however:
 Package xserver-xorg-core is not installed.

dpkg: error processing package xserver-xorg-input-libinput (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1ubuntu1) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 xserver-xorg-input-libinput


root@XPS-13:~# apt-get install xserver-xorg-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree 
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 xserver-xorg-core-lts-vivid : Conflicts: xserver-xorg-core
 xserver-xorg-input-libinput : Depends: libinput10 (>= 0.21.0) but it is not installable
 Depends: xserver-xorg-core (>= 2:1.16.99.901)
 xserver-xorg-lts-vivid : Recommends: libegl1-mesa-drivers-lts-vivid but it is not installable
 Conflicts: xserver-xorg-core (>= 0~)
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

So back to square one on that one. I later found a GitHuB site that provided some configurations of different kinds.

But those didn’t help either. So I continued searching and found a really good Arch Linux Wiki that provided many tips and tricks on how to configure everything. I tried it all – but no success.

I had some issues finding the correct path to the conf file, so if you are looking for it, it’s here:

$~: sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

After many hours (days) googling the issue I finally gave up. That is when we found Ubuntu MATE, that will be my next project. I’ll maybe write a post about that as well.

Dual boot

As I also mentioned in the previous post, I had ALOT of issues with even getting the XPS-13 to boot with Elementary OS. I will not write about all the different things I tried, but instead I will give you a workaround that actually works:

  • Install Elementary 0.3.1 as normal (no special partitioning).
    Follow: elementary.io – Installation
  • Boot will end in grub shell. Enter:
    configfile (hd and press TAB. Select one and add /boot/grub/grub.cfg
    Example: configfile (hd0, gpt4)/boot/grub/grub.cfg
  • Open terminal after boot and type:
    cd /boot/efi/EFI/grub
    sudo cp grubx64.efi grubx64.efi.backup (just in case)
    sudo rm grubx64.efi
    sudo cp /boot/grub/x86_64-efi/grub.efi /boot/efi/EFI/grub/grubx64.efi
That’s all

So there you have it, not everything I did, but at least a brief summary of some fixes that might help you. Feel free to write in the comments below, and if you have a working solution – please let me know.

And btw, here is another guy that also struggled with the same thing as me. He posted some download and patches as well. Good luck!

Best Regards
Daniel Hansson

 Pro tip

Publish you server online!