Personal Experience on bad time install of Ubuntu... 17.10

[fratealberto]

Dear Ramon,

I saw you create a nice and complete page to help guys installing UBUNTU 16++ on DELL 9560.

https://github.com/rcasero/doc/wiki/Ubuntu-linux-on-Dell-XPS-15-(9560)

Out is plenty of similar pages, and I prefer not to waste internet with one more. Hence I supposed
that mailing to you my little experience it could benefit a small integration to your wiki.

Five days ago I received my new DELL 9560 as an upgrade of my previous 9550. I was already
aware of bad times installing 9550 and looked out for an updated tutorial on 9560 before start.
Most of the instructions on your page were the same I found for 9550, and I followed your tutorial step by step. Accidentally I found two problems more:

1. Installation process sometimes crashed at start;
2. In other boot, during the installation, it crashed at the end, when installing grub2 on EFI.

I lost almost two days in figuring out what happened and restore this computer since I found no
documentation explaining the grub2 installation process.

At the very end I discovered that most of the user knows that latest NVIDIA drivers were unisuitable for this machine, and you have to fall back to nVIDIA 381.22 to have a stable video interaction. This is properly mentioned in your Wiki, what was not mentioned is that it is not wise to install ubuntu with the standard option. These infact will use the most recent drivers which can corrupt, halt or hang the system with unpredictable state.

Hence (EVEN) during the first installation it is wise to add the nomodeset option to the Ubuntu/Mint grub-menu before starting, otherwise the installation procedure may fail and crash your filesystem.

More in details, my installation failed while writing grub2 the very first time, and I had severe difficulties in discovering the error since there was no clear diagnosis of the problem with standard installation tools. At the end of my analysis I discovered that the failure on the first attempt created a corrupted EFI-Filesystem that prevented all of my subsequent attempts (even with the correct nomodeset options).

In such case the right tools to solve this issue are:

• Boot only in live mode (Ubuntu or Mint) with nomodeset option
• Manually use ubiquity -b option to prevent grub installation during OS install
• Use FSCK on EFI partition to repair corrupted block
• Use boot-repair to ensure grub install.
• downgrade the video driver
• Possibly install the dual video card microcode
  (http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2016/04/switch-intel-nvidia-graphics-ubuntu-16-04/)
• Restore the driver use removing nomodeset from grub-menu

PS
[boot-repair has also the nomodeset switch in the adv. configuration to ease following tasks]
If you simply use boot repair without repairing EFI partition, grub or boot-repair will tell you that EFI is readonly, but this is only a consequence of a previous error that can be shown through dmesg.

I hope this can help your readers
Sicerely
C.Alberto

[dragisha]

Also a 9560... I did update from 17.04 and all went almost well... As with 17.04 before, system did not boot to gdm3 login, and it was pretty adventurous for few hours. In the end, I cleaned remnants of i915 backport, reinstalled nvidia-384 (during this dkms modules were rebuilt) and then system booted into gdm3 login.
My main issue right now is - Intel still does not have update for graphics drivers and my laptop works with nvidia only.
Intel graphics update is refusing my OS version. Fake bumping down by editing lsb-release does nothing at all, as there's nothing to update. Oibaf drivers seemingly do not help too. I spent time to make it work at all, and I need my laptop and my time for my work, so I did not go into this deeper. Later :)