Inspiron 17R: Hardware Tweaks

As with any new laptop, there is new technology to learn.  Fortunately, as best I can tell, most of everything is working.  The only things that didn’t just work were the touchpad and the Nvidia card.

Currently, I don’t have any drivers listed in the “Additional Drivers” dialog.

Touchpad

I can’t get my touchpad to work.  It works fine as a regular mouse, but the multitouch or scroll features don’t work.  According to xlist, it is only detecting it as a generic PS/2 mouse:

skp@chestnut:~$ xinput --list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ PS/2 Generic Mouse id=15 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
 ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Video Bus id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Power Button id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Sleep Button id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Laptop_Integrated_Webcam_E4HD id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=14 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Dell WMI hotkeys id=16 [slave keyboard (3)]

I found a driver to fix it, but the link is broken.  So, I am still looking for a way to fix the issue.

Just to try, I installed the multitouch package:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-multitouch

As far as I can tell, I do have the latest version, but still no luck:

skp@chestnut:~$ dpkg -s xserver-xorg-input-multitouch
Package: xserver-xorg-input-multitouch
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: x11
Installed-Size: 85
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Architecture: amd64
Source: xf86-input-multitouch
Version: 1.0~rc2+git20110312-2build2
Provides: xorg-driver-input
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4), libmtdev1 (>= 1.0.10), xorg-input-abi-16, xserver-xorg-core (>= 2:1.10.99.901)
Description: Multitouch X input driver
 This X input driver provides gestures support for multitouch touchpads,
 in particular those with integrated button.
Original-Maintainer: Nobuhiro Iwamatsu <iwamatsu@debian.org>
Homepage: http://bitmath.org/code/multitouch/

Ubuntu Bugs:

• Multitouch support not available for Synaptics touchpads v7.2
• SynapticsTouchpad
• Ubuntu Forums: Ubuntu 11.10: Touchpad: Multitouch not working (Dell Inspiron 17R N7110)
• “xf86-input-multitouch” package in Ubuntu

NVidia Graphics Card

The next hardware challenge was the graphics card.  I did finally get this working as far as I can tell.

This first link sounded like a good place to start.  My only problem was that I had a discrete graphics card.  This link is geared toward a regular graphics card.

Warning: skip to the discrete graphics card part unless you have a regular Nvidia card.

Technology Linux & Windows: INSTALL NVIDIA DRIVERS ON UBUNTU 12.04 PRECISE/UBUNTU 11.10 ONEIRIC/LINUX MINT

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

For the discrete video card, you need to install Bumblebee.  Here’s what I found:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia

Unfortunately, that didn’t work either.  It installed, but it gave me this when I tried to use it:

skp@chestnut:~$ optirun glxspheres
[ 1357.150757] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to assign any connected display devices to X screen 0

[ 1357.150810] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.

I found I could get a little more output, by adding the -vv switch:

skp@chestnut:~$ optirun -vv glxspheres
[ 1608.198812] [DEBUG]Reading file: /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf
[ 1608.380202] [DEBUG]optirun version 3.0.1 starting...
[ 1608.380236] [DEBUG]Active configuration:
[ 1608.380243] [DEBUG] bumblebeed config file: /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf
[ 1608.380250] [DEBUG] X display: :8
[ 1608.380256] [DEBUG] LD_LIBRARY_PATH: /usr/lib/nvidia-current:/usr/lib32/nvidia-current
[ 1608.380263] [DEBUG] Socket path: /var/run/bumblebee.socket
[ 1608.380268] [DEBUG] VGL Compression: proxy
[ 1608.898644] [INFO]Response: No - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to assign any connected display devices to X screen 0

[ 1608.898676] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to assign any connected display devices to X screen 0

[ 1608.898682] [DEBUG]Socket closed.
[ 1608.898730] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.
[ 1608.898742] [DEBUG]Killing all remaining processes.

I found an article suggesting that I needed version 304.22, and I had an earlier version:

skp@chestnut:~$ apt-show-versions nvidia-current
nvidia-current/precise uptodate 302.17-0ubuntu1~precise~xup2

To upgrade, I added this repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:upubuntu-com/nvidia-unstable
sudo apt-get update

Then, I used the update manager to update the NVidia Driver:

Now, the version looks right:

skp@chestnut:~$ apt-show-versions nvidia-current
nvidia-current/precise uptodate 304.22-beta-precise

Added this line to /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia:

And, I set the driver line in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

After rebooting, I get this message now:

skp@chestnut:~$ optirun -vv glxspheres
[ 1161.323612] [DEBUG]Reading file: /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf
[ 1161.324138] [INFO]Configured driver: nvidia
[ 1161.324182] [ERROR]The Bumblebee daemon has not been started yet or the socket path /var/run/bumblebee.socket was incorrect.
[ 1161.324193] [DEBUG]Socket closed.
[ 1161.324206] [ERROR]Could not connect to bumblebee daemon - is it running?

Reinstalling Bumblebee:

sudo apt-get purge bumblebee
[sudo] password for skp:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
 virtualgl language-pack-kde-zh-hans-base virtualgl-libs-ia32:i386
 firefox-locale-zh-hans libturbojpeg libturbojpeg:i386 kde-l10n-engb
 virtualgl-libs virtualgl-libs:i386 bbswitch-dkms language-pack-zh-hans-base
 kde-l10n-zhcn language-pack-zh-hans language-pack-kde-zh-hans
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
 bumblebee* bumblebee-nvidia*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 219 kB disk space will be freed.

Then, to follow through, I did the auto remove:

sudo apt-get autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
 bbswitch-dkms firefox-locale-zh-hans kde-l10n-engb kde-l10n-zhcn
 language-pack-kde-zh-hans language-pack-kde-zh-hans-base
 language-pack-zh-hans language-pack-zh-hans-base libturbojpeg
 libturbojpeg:i386 virtualgl virtualgl-libs virtualgl-libs:i386
 virtualgl-libs-ia32:i386
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 14 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 27.0 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Reinstalling still didn’t help, so I went through some of the troubleshooting steps. Checking the service I found that I could run this command to check to see if the service was running:

sudo service bumblebeed status

This is what I found:

bumblebeed stop/waiting

I tried to start the service with this:

sudo service bumblebeed start

It said it started…

bumblebeed start/running, process 3745

But, I found this in my syslog:

bumblebeed[3745]: Module 'nvidia-current' is not found.
kernel: [ 413.587064] init: bumblebeed main process (3745) terminated with status 1
kernel: [ 413.587106] init: bumblebeed main process ended, respawning
bumblebeed[3748]: Module 'nvidia-current' is not found.
kernel: [ 413.594666] init: bumblebeed main process (3748) terminated with status 1
kernel: [ 413.594707] init: bumblebeed main process ended, respawning

Then, I found I could start the daemon with this:

sudo /usr/sbin/bumblebeed --daemon -vv --driver nvidia --driver-module nvidia -x /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia

This seemed to start it and got me closer.  Now, this is what I get:

optirun -vv glxspheres
[ 1595.775033] [DEBUG]Reading file: /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf
[ 1595.775241] [INFO]Configured driver: nvidia
[ 1595.942919] [DEBUG]optirun version 3.0.1 starting...
[ 1595.942956] [DEBUG]Active configuration:
[ 1595.942963] [DEBUG] bumblebeed config file: /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf
[ 1595.942969] [DEBUG] X display: :8
[ 1595.942975] [DEBUG] LD_LIBRARY_PATH: /usr/lib/nvidia-current:/usr/lib32/nvidia-current
[ 1595.942981] [DEBUG] Socket path: /var/run/bumblebee.socket
[ 1595.942987] [DEBUG] VGL Compression: proxy
[ 1597.924547] [INFO]Response: No - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to assign any connected display devices to X screen 0

[ 1597.924578] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to assign any connected display devices to X screen 0

[ 1597.924587] [DEBUG]Socket closed.
[ 1597.924609] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.
[ 1597.924620] [DEBUG]Killing all remaining processes.

Reading through the logs, it said no screens.  I found an error about DFP.  The problem was that I had lost my change of ‘Option “ConnectedMonitor” “DFP”‘ in the config file.  When I redid that, it worked again!

Resources

• Ask Ubuntu: Ubuntu (any version) and 650M CUDA
• Ask Ubuntu: How well do laptops with Nvidia Optimus work?
• Hybrid Graphics Wiki
• Bumblebee GitHub: Failed to assign any connected display devices to X screen 0
• Ubuntu Wiki: Bumblebee
• Bumblebee GitHub: Bumblebee 3.0 doesn’t work (Error loading or GLX)
• Bumblebee GitHub: Can’t start bumblebeed daemon
• Bumblebee GitHub: Troubleshooting
• Debian Wiki: Bumblebee Project