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Dell Dual Boot Ubuntu4/24/2021
I initially couldnt understand what was happening reinstalled Linux multiple times just to make sure the installation was fine.And all this on a 4k display without font scaling, so literally reading ants there.But this list used to a lot longer 4-5 yrs ago so thats a very good sign of how much the ecosystem has evolved over the years.What my expectation out of this move is a secure a dev friendly work environment and better compilation speeds.
Im still not holding my breath for improved battery life though. When enabling Intel RST, the BIOS does in fact exposes the SSD through a remapped AHCI that looks like AHCI but does not behave like AHCI. More specifically, we want to install Kubuntu 19.10, but at this point we are getting desperate and would settle for any distribution. The main issue is that laptop has a single SSD, but Linux cant detect it so we are not able to select it in the installer. Dell Dual Boot Ubuntu Update The BIOSIn particular, we update the BIOS driver: the initial version was 1.1.1, we installed the version 1.3.0. The version 1.1.1 wasnt even able to boot into Kubuntus live USB ). We set the partition scheme to MBR, target system to BIOS or UEFI and file system to FAT32. Select Start Kubuntu (Safe Graphics), the default option (Start Kubuntu) leads to a black screen. At this point we can run some commands to get a better view of the system. It crashes when at the step where we should select the hard drive. It prevents the installer from formatting the hard drive and installing Linux. There are multiple reports of people encountering this issue (see links below). ![]() ![]() It serves as the interface between the hardware and operating systems: all operating systems are able to use it to communicate with the hard drives. By duplicating data on multiple physical drives, it is more resistant to hard drive failures. Dell Dual Boot Ubuntu Software Solution WorkingIt has a feature called RAID that is a software solution working with a single drive. Outside Intel, it is often called fake RAID because it requires special software support instead of using multiple physical drives and being transparent to the OS. Here is what this section looks like on this laptop (Bios version 1.2.1). Since direct AHCI is not available on the Inspiron laptop, it prevents the installation of Linux. This reputation played when I helped my friend chose a laptop: I expected the installation to go smoothly. This whole situation where they release a laptop with a new BIOS preventing from even installing Linux severely damaged their image. There are multiple threads on the Dell forums complaining about this issue ( here is the most commented on ). It would allow to select this mode and install Linux without further issues. This would be the ideal solution, but I dont know how reactive Dell is about these issues. Opening support requests about this issue may raise the priority of a BIOS update. The most recent discussion I could find on Linux Kernel Mailing List dates from June 2019.
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