Installing Unbuntu 18.04

[Peter-Strain]

I had some trouble installing installing Unbuntu 18.04 getting error message;

NMI watchdog: Watchdog detected hard LOCKUP on cpu 4

Finally resolved it however by going into the install menu, pressing Fn F6. Turing off;

nomodeset

Then selecting the install option. After installation was complete installing the following packages;

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-390

Then going into;

/etc/default/grub

And commenting out;

#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset"

Restarting the laptop and done.

[oliver-dvorski]

Did you install Nvidia prime? And does prime-select work for you?

[Peter-Strain]

Yes and after some playing around it all seems to be working.

[cywtf]

Just for the sake of the update, I got a 9750 yesterday and was able to install Ubuntu 18.04 without any issues.

[gregsifr]

@Rootion Have you applied any of the power saving tips outlined by the Arch Wiki? If so do you have any of the instructions you used?

Some of the power saving tips include:

• Keep Bluetooth off by default during startup + power saving modes
• Turn off / disable touchscreen
• Disable nVidia powerdraw (consumes around 7w when idle)
• Enable NVME APST (allows NVME SSDs to be switched to lower power states when idle)
• Enable power saving features for the i915 kernel module
• Undervolt CPU and iGPU

It would also be good to enable touchpad gestures using libinput.

When using Windows I've undervolted my CPU + iGPU and have achieved 90 additional minutes of runtime. I am confident that doing the above on the 9570 would extend the battery life to 8-10 hours with 50% screen brightness.

Unfortunately the Arch instructions are for more advanced users and some of the packages might have different names. For example: bbswitch seems to be bbswitch-dkms and there are two packages for bumblebee on Ubuntu: bumblebee and bumblebee-nvidia.

[cywtf]

@gregsifr thanks a lot, this is very valuable info. I noticed that my battery was going down really quick in Ubuntu while in Windows 10 it holds much longer. I will get my hands into this today.

About the instructions I used:

• Followed all this useful prep work.
• Installed all updates from Dell. I had to manually check BIOS update as the updater didn't suggest me one and there was one that was released recently. Before the BIOS update the laptop was running loud and hot, after all the updates all these thermal issues seem to be solved.
• Resized my Windows HD, created some free space.
• Boot into Ubuntu 18.04 live usb, created the necessary partitions for Linux and followed the installer. This is pretty straightforward.

The installation was successful and the dual boot is running smoothly. The only issue is the battery consumption in Ubuntu, but I will follow your recommendations today.

[gregsifr]

@Rootion I am going through this process too so if you don't mind could you contribute what you found to work to a new repository I created?