My experience running XPS 9300 on Debian Testing (Bullseye)

I have been using this XPS for 5 days and it’s been a great experience so far. It is pretty compact, has a great performance and is so beatiful!!

I will write down some questions about the problem itself and then explain in dept the analysis and how I went through them.

How to install Linux on Dell XPS 9300?

First of all, make sure you have properly created your boot pendrive with UEFI support. I recommend to use Etcher for Linux or Rufus for Windows, both are really straight forward.

If you are trying to find the pendrive on the boot menu and you can’t, this is most likely to be the image not signed, and as you have Secure Boot enabled, it will not allow the pendrive to show up. Thus, the first thing is disable Secure Boot.

You can press F2 on boot menu, find the Security section on the left bar and disable it.

Once you are able to boot it, you will probably find another issue where the Hard Drive is not recognized to install the system and this is due to the RAID option enabled. Do the same for it and change from RAID to AHCI.

After that, you will be able to successfully install you Linux operating system.

No wireless connection on my Dell XPS 9300 using Linux

Cool, now my system is installed but I don’t have wireless connection. Usually, we would just plug an internet cable and download what we need to get it working, but as I don’t have one, I had to use another computer to do that.

The apt package that contains the firmware is firmware-iwlwifi which we could simply install using apt-get, but again, no internet connection for that.

I did some research and downloaded the .deb manually here. You can move to a pendrive and install manually with:

$ sudo dpkg -i nameofthepackage.deb

Restart the XPS and it should be working.

If you want to use the same version as mine, click here.

Bluetooth not working on XPS 9300

My bluetooth was not working and after running the dmesg command I could see some errors like this:

Direct firmware load for intel/ibt-19-32-4.sfi failed with error -2

It was trying to load a firmware but it did not exist. You can find the firmwares inside /lib/firmware.

To solve one can simply install the package linux-firmware like this:

$ sudo apt install linux-firmware

If it does not work, you can do like I did and download manually here. Find the ibt-19-32-4.sfi and ibt-19-32-4.ddc, get both and move to /lib/firmware/intel. Restart it and BOOM!!

$ sudo mv ~/Downloads/ibt-19-32-4.sfi /lib/firmware/intel
$ sudo mv ~/Downloads/ibt-19-32-4.ddc /lib/firmware/intel

XPS 9300 does not power off completely

My XPS was not shutting down completely, the LCD led and the cooler were running. The workaround from this forum worked for me. It seems a bug between 5.5 and 5.7 Kernel versions.

You have to disable the Intel VT-d on BIOS. It will not disable the virtualization, just the optimization. It is working fine so far.

If any of those tips brought some value to you, drop a comment here and let me know! :)

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