Linux on a new Dell Laptop

I've now got a new Dell Inspiron Laptop (Woo hoo!) and decided to set it up to dual boot Linux and Windows 10.

This post is really for my own reference and benefit, although lessons learnt may well be more widely useful.

Installation

I decided to install Linux Mint with Cinnamon. This was really quite painless.

The drive has approx 1.8 TB of useable space, so I shrunk the Windows C: drive to just over 1TB leaving about 750GB for Mint.

To do this, I entered Disk Management into the windows search box which matched with "Create and Format hard disk partitions" as best match.

Open up this tool, right click on the C:\ drive and select Shrink Volume...

I also needed to disable secure boot in the BIOS. This was easy, simply restart the machine hit F2 on start-up. Then when the BIOS configuration screen appears, navigate to Secure Boot and check disable.

I'd previously created a Linux Mint DVD from the Linux mint downloads page. To boot the Linux disk, restart and hit F12 on start-up.

This should start the LiveCD version which has a desktop icon to install. Double click on this and start the installation.

The important point comes when you are prompted to select the Installation type. At this point check "Something else"

You now enter the screen to manage partitions, select the free space from the earlier shrink and click on +
You will be presented with a dialog to configure the partitions, I created 3 (Repeat the process in this order)

• 50GB Logical for the Linux core, Root : '/'
• 690 GB Logical for Root: 'home/'
• The remainder for Swap, about 7GB

Then run the install. This asked for a few configuration settings, for example Wifi login and language settings. Wait about 15 minutes and finally reboot.

The last thing I did was to run sudo-apt get update and sudo apt-get upgrade to bring the packages up to date.

Video driver

My graphics card is an AMD Radeon R5 M335. This seems to have been released in October 2015 and at the time of writing there were no proprietary Linux drivers for this.

The open source AMD driver doesn't seem to handle the card either. I get the following pop-up on the desktop and errors are shown in the logs (obtained using the dmesg command)



dmesg | grep drm

returns the following

[    1.759698] [drm] Radeon Display Connectors
[    1.759763] [drm] Cannot find any crtc or sizes - going 1024x768
[    1.761755] [drm] fb mappable at 0xC0242000
[    1.761756] [drm] vram apper at 0xC0000000
[    1.761757] [drm] size 3145728
[    1.761758] [drm] fb depth is 24
[    1.761758] [drm]    pitch is 4096
[    1.761942] radeon 0000:01:00.0: fb1: radeondrmfb frame buffer device
[    1.796379] [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state] *ERROR* si_upload_sw_state failed
[    1.796420] [drm] Initialized radeon 2.39.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0
[   21.908902] [drm] probing gen 2 caps for device 8086:9d10 = 1724843/e
[   21.908908] [drm] PCIE gen 3 link speeds already enabled
[   21.911907] [drm] PCIE GART of 1024M enabled (table at 0x0000000000040000).
[   22.488470] [drm:r600_ring_test] *ERROR* radeon: ring 0 test failed (scratch(0x850C)=0xCAFEDEAD)
[   22.488474] [drm:si_resume] *ERROR* si startup failed on resume
[   22.489091] [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state] *ERROR* si_upload_sw_state failed

But Linux is reverting to Intel graphics

lspci  | grep VGA returns  00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 1916 (rev 07)

The machine seems to be working well at the moment so I'm not too worried about this. (I'm not interested in heavy graphics work on this machine) I'll keep a look out for news and will post any updates I see to this page.