I was using Dell Vostro 5459 previously. However, it has some hardware deficiencies. The battery capacity keeps dropping drastically within a year. That’s a very bad experience. Now, the fully charged battery is only 1% of the designed capacity. Then I purchased an external power bank from Dell. But that’s not an ideal design for a laptop that you need to bring extra gadget to everywhere, and charging external battery is too troublesome.
Since I mostly work from home, battery issue is still bearable. Then about 4 years of usage, the keyboard became weird. It will randomly fire some keys (I forgot which key) (related post). That’s truly unbearable because it affects my working experience. At the end I bought a new laptop, Lenovo Legion Y7000.
But recently, I have done some online shopping and I bought some useful tools, including (i) laptop opener pry tools, and (ii) compressed air. Both are super useful for DIY hardware cleaning. I use opener pry tools instead of screwdriver to avoid physical damage of the hardware cover. Moreover, taking out Dell Vostro 5459 keyboard becomes much easier. For compressed air, it allows me to clean out the dirt from laptop without disassembling the laptop. Disassembling the laptop for cleaning is too difficult for a noob like me.
Finally, I bought a Dell Vostro 5459 compatible keyboard replacement through online shopping. That’s wonderful thing, since the laptop keyboard is not purchasable from Dell official website. I replaced the keyboard with the pry tools I bought earlier, then clean the fans with compressed air. I haven’t spent time to verify whether the keyboard issue is totally solved, though I think it is solved.
In the previous post (1 year ago), I mentioned the hibernation issue. I believed that it was related to the NVidia graphic card. Related forum can be found here.
But these few days, I notice that whenever I shut down the laptop, it will show the systemd messages. Previously, if I did suspend my laptop, then resume, then shut down will show only black blank screen, until the power off. I believe that the graphic card issue is being fixed with the recent update.
I am now using linux-lts 4.9.13-1 and nvidia-dkms 378.13-2
Due to the changes of the career, I invested on Dell Vostro 5459, after a long survey. I chose it because it is compatible to Linux. The compatibility to Linux meaning that, all the hardware devices are accessible by Linux. Besides that, it has the NVIDIA graphic card, which allows me to use GPGPU to do my research and study. Moreover, I can play high quality 3D graphics games.
Ubuntu
So, the laptop I bought was pre-installed with Ubuntu. And, I was impressed by the Ubuntu first boot video, which can be found here.
Partition and bootloader
It is new laptop, thus the hard disk partitioning table is using GPT format instead of MBR format. And the laptop uses UEFI boot system by default. It will be very convenient to have multiboot with several OSes.
In order to do partitioning, I used my favourite tool, SystemRescueCD. But I failed to run the X11 window, due to the very new NVIDIA graphic card. (I believe I can run the X11 now.)
Before partitioning and formatting the hard disk, I checked the xorg.conf from the existing Ubuntu, believed that it can help me to figure out how to start X11 window in SystemRescueCD. Then I discovered that /etc/X11/xorg.conf does not exist. This is a very important point.
Consequently, I used the command-line interface to re-partitioning the hard disk. Because I was going to install Windows and Arch Linux on it.
Windows
Though I prefer Linux, Ubuntu not my primary OS. So, I have to install the Arch Linux. Before installing Arch Linux, due to the luxurious hardware specification, I intended to install Windows 7. The laptop does not have USB2.0, but only USB3.0, and I didn’t want to install Windows 7 through external DVD-ROM, because I didn’t want to burn Windows 7 to a DVD. As a result, Windows 7 with USB3.0 cannot be installed. Looking for the solution, extra drivers are required. Thus, I gave up Windows 7 and tried Windows 8.1. (Sorry, Windows 8 and 10 are not my favourite.)
Great. Windows 8.1 is not bad after installation. I came back to Windows drivers later, since Windows is my secondary OS, for the purpose of… gaming.
Arch Linux
Installing Arch Linux needs some skills, and Internet connection is very important. So, I installed all the packages based on the old laptop, just following the powerful Arch Linux Wiki.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA GeForce 930M is very troublesome. After installing Arch Linux, to fully utilise my graphic card, I decided to use NVIDIA driver instead of Nouveau.
However, nvidia-xconfig generated xorg.conf file does not work. I failed to run the X11 window as in the SystemRescueCD.
As a result, I removed the NVIDIA related section in the xorg.conf according to the Arch Linux forum here. And the pre-installed Ubuntu does not have the xorg.conf as well. After removing the file, X11 window works fine.
After running the Arch Linux and configuring my preferences, I found that some of the screensavers (from xscreensaver) showed the error message,
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0"
So, I knew that there is something wrong with my Xorg configuration and the NVIDIA.
Keep doing the trial and error, then I discovered something called bumblebee. Actually I am still very confused with this bumblebee, only know that it is related to NVIDA Optimus. And, I also don’t know what the hell is NVIDIA Optimus, only know that it is something wonderful.
After installing bumblebee, then the nvidia-libgl package is replaced by mesa-libgl. And the xscreensaver did not show the error message above anymore.
Since installed bumblebee, I supposed I can use Optimus with optirun command. Running
optirun glxgears -info
I got the new error,
libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
...
Then, I thought may be my NVIDIA is too new, so I tried to install nvidia-beta. But it did not solve the problem as well.
As a result, I tried nvidia-dkms. Yeah! It works. “optirun” works fine now.
Windows 8.1
I love Dell, because the drivers are available online. I just download all the important drivers, graphic card, sound card, WiFi drivers, etc. Then I booted into Windows 8.1, and installed all the drivers. I just wonder, Arch Linux can use the WiFi device immediately during the installation, but Windows cannot? That means, if I have Windows and WiFi only, but does not have the driver, then how can I download the drivers?
After installed all the drivers, then I booted into Arch Linux, but failed. Because I failed to mount the Windows partition in Linux after installing the drivers. Then I found that, it is because of the Fast Startup feature in Windows 8. (Solution is here, look for the Fast Startup.) Because Fast Startup causes the partition “not clean”, so that Linux cannot mount it.
After disabling the Fast Startup, then everything works fine now.
Data transfer
Transferring vast amount of data between computers is very time consuming. I previously used an external hard disk. But transferring data from a 500G laptop to a 1T laptop, using an external hard disk is not applicable, since I don’t have extra empty hard disk.
At the end, I used the ethernet cable to transfer the data. (This is what I learnt from my student previously.) In Linux, I used the Network Manager to share the wired connection. Then directly connect two laptops with a single ethernet cable, and router is not required. Ethernet cable is faster than WiFi, and I can transfer whatever data I want from A to B or vice versa.
But still, I have to use the SSH to mount the target laptop.
This is a time consuming process.
Hibernation and resume issue
Now the only problem is resume from hibernation in Arch Linux. The resuming from hibernation works inconsistently. I have tried to install Linux LTS version, but it is worse because I cannot use Fn key after booting in Linux LTS.
I am still figuring out how to solve this problem.
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