[MULTI BOOT] Experience installing Groovy on Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1, 7506

[ThorstenNY]

Hi,

I wanted to share my (pretty awesome) experience installing Groovy Gorilla on a brand-new Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1 (7506), which comes with a 4K display.

SUMMARY: Almost everything worked as expected, pretty much out of the box or with minimal configuration (i.e., without manually editing anything in /etc or ~/.config.)

BACKGROUND: I've been using Linux (with mostly KDE) as my primary desktop for 20 years. This has been my easiest installation so far.

WHAT JUST WORKED:
* getting Kubuntu Groovy to boot from a USB stick
* resizing the Win10 partition of the laptop?s single 1 TB SSD (from the live Kubuntu session) and installing Groovy in a dual-boot environment
* booting Groovy and Win10 post-installation, with no problems whatsoever
* scaling the 4K (3840x2160) display to have reasonable font and icon sizes, using the system settings GUI for user Plasma sessions and a minor /etc tweak for the login screen (sddm)
* the stylus that comes with the 2-in-1 laptop
* power management (suspending when the lid is closed; waking up and re-establishing the previous wifi connection when the lid is opened)
* virtually everything else: wifi, sound, webcam, ...

WHAT I HAVEN'T EVEN TRIED TO GET TO WORK (yet):
* the fingerprint reader (a Goodix 27c6:538d, which supposedly isn't supported yet by any driver available to us)
* automatically toggling between speaker and headphone sound by plugging in (or unplugging) wired headphones
* rotating the display to take full advantage of the 2-in-1?s tent and tablet modes (the option provided by the system settings is broken)

STEP-BY-STEP INSTALLATION EXPERIENCE

1. I downloaded https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/r...ktop-amd64.iso and put it on a USB stick using the usb-creator-kde utility on an older Kubuntu installation. I got an error message that a boot record couldn't be created, but everything still worked.

2. While in Windows 10 on the new laptop, I plugged in the USB drive and booted into "recovery mode" or "safe mode" or whatever it's called. (I barely use Windows.) I think holding down Shift while clicking on Restart is sufficient to trigger this. After power-cycling, a blue screen with two boot options (the existing SSD and the USB stick) came right up.

3. Choosing the USB stick option resulted in a black screen, with seemingly nothing else happening for at least 5 minutes. I honestly thought this USB stick wouldn't boot Kubuntu at all, when the Kubuntu logo finally showed up.

4. I chose "Try Kubuntu" to see how much of the hardware would work.

5. Fonts and icons were impossibly tiny at first on this 4K display (which could easily be changed through system settings), but everything (else) important seemed to work out of the box. So I went a head and clicked Install Kubuntu.

6. Trying to keep this as simple as possible, I chose the most automated ?Guided dual-boot? option. The GUI will suggest a 50:50 split between the existing Windows and the new Kubuntu partition, but you can change the ratio by sliding the colored portions of the bar representing the drive left or right. (Minor pet-peeve: there is no scale on that bar or other numerical representation to tell you what size you?re choosing for the partition split, so I actually used a ruler to roughly calculate how long the bar should be for the roughly 150 GB I wanted to leave to Windows.)

7. After that, everything went swimmingly: resizing and partially reformatting the drive, picking language and timezone settings, creating an initial user, downloading and installing Kubuntu packages, and finally rebooting into grub and from there, the KDE login manager, sddm and finally the Plasma environment of my first user.

8. I scaled the display to 250% using system settings. Easy enough, but I had to log out and back in again to get it to work on ALL UI elements.

9. To scale sddm by the same factor, I appended

[X11]
ServerArguments=-nolisten tcp -dpi 148

to /etc/sddm.conf.d/kde_settings.conf, which took effect after a reboot.

So far so good. If I learn more about the few non-critical issues left, I'll post it here.

[claydoh]

WHAT I HAVEN?T EVEN TRIED TO GET TO WORK (yet):
? the fingerprint reader (a Goodix 27c6:538d, which supposedly isn?t supported yet by any driver available to us)

Yeah, unfortunately that is probably going to be a long time coming, if ever, due to how these particular readers work, and lack of data or specs from the readers' manufacturer.

? automatically toggling between speaker and headphone sound by plugging in (or unplugging) wired headphones

That I dunnno, but sounds like it should be fixable via custom config tweaks, after some research and experimentation.

? rotating the display to take full advantage of the 2-in-1?s tent and tablet modes (the option provided by the system settings is broken)

This one will get better soon, in Kubuntu 21.04. I don't think it works well in 20.10, but I have not tested it there on my convertible.
There are scripts out there that will automatically rotate the screen in xorg, probably ones specifically for your laptop, but there are some 'generic' ones out there that have worked on my Lenovo.
However, with Plasma 5.20 or higher, a Wayland session should support automatic screen rotation, assuming the sensors are properly detected. Which is highly likely, even on such a new system.
An onscreen keyboard, however, isn't straightforward still.

In a normal Ubuntu install (Gnome, and I believe a Wayland session?) the screen rotation and on screen keyboard do work for me.
Plasma is still behind in terms of this, but is catching up.

[ThorstenNY]

Thanks, claydoh.

I didn’t even know the 2-in-1 came with a fingerprint reader, so I didn’t really expect it to be there or working. ;-)

The headphones issue has been the biggest change to get used to. That plugging in headphones would change sound output from speakers to headphones is just a user experience that’s been working out of the box for me for some 20 years. Being able to keep headphones plugged in when I want to listen to speaker sound is at least a potential benefit, I suppose. A better widget to toggle speaker/headphones output would be great, though. To toggle this, right now I have to
* click on the speaker icon in the system tray
* scroll down (past several HDMIx entries) to Headphones (Tiger LP Smart Sound ...)
* click on the tiny burger menu
* click on an even tinier checkbox (either "Headphones" or "Speaker")
That is convoluted with a mouse or stylus and basically impossible with touch.

All the audio settings widgets I’ve tried (only a few, so there may be others out there) only allow me to toggle between the different HDMI channels and the builtin (?) headphones/speaker option, but not change headphones vs. speaker WITHIN that channel.

Finally, on screen rotation, it appears a script that combines the desired xrandr rotation with the appropriate xinput translation for mouse/touch/stylus/touchpad should do the trick. As of 20.10, it appears that the Display Configuration GUI does the xrandr rotation only, which really doesn’t make sense.

[jlittle]

but not change headphones vs. speaker WITHIN that channel.

The command line programme pactl may be able to help you. I find it a pig to use, but if you can sort out how to drive it to get what you want, a widget can invoke it.

[IMO it's easiest to create a menu item in the "Application Menu" (once known as the K menu), right-click then "Edit applications", then pin it to the task manager. If I make a widget directly it gets lost too easily.]

[ThorstenNY]

Perfect! pactl was exactly the pointer I needed.

I can now toggle speaker and headphones using

pactl set-sink-port 4 "[Out] Headphones"

and

pactl set-sink-port 4 "[Out] Speaker"

The options syntax (a sequentially assigned number for the sink and a two-part verbose string for the port) is pretty weird, of course, but once that was figured out, the rest was trivial (as is mapping this command to a keyboard shortcut.)

Thank you so much.

[ThorstenNY]

A quick update on the pen/stylus that came with the 2-in-1 (and sits in a nifty magnetic holder just above the keyboard) ...

It’s mostly been working out of the box (it moves the mouse cursor just fine, but registering clicks is just a tad inconsistent), so I’d been looking at the graphics tablet settings to try to configure it, but it turns out that it’s presenting itself to the system as an additional mouse, for which there doesn’t appear to be any GUI configuration option.

Hovering with the pen over web page elements triggers :hover just perfectly, which is great for testing web pages when no (real) mouse is present.

Pressing the pen button under the index finger works like a middle mouse button in most contexts. It’s best to do while slightly hovering with the pen tip over the display, because otherwise two "clicks" (left and middle) may be registered. Touching the display with the tip mostly works like a left click or touch. Clicking the second pen button (at the end of the pen) doesn’t appear to trigger any events.)