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I just purchased a new Dell XPS 13 from the Microsoft Store and installed Ubuntu on it. It seemed to work fine with a few issues that appeared to be resolvable with the last bios update. I performed the bios update which prevented my Ubuntu partition from booting.

Attempting to re-install, I get the following error message... "The 'grub-efi-amd64-signed' packed failed to install into /target/. Without the GRUB boot loader, the installed system will not boot"

I can't seem to find much information on resolving this and after lots of searching, I can't seem to find any sort of reason as to why the grub bootloader won't install. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Justin
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1 Answers1

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I got the Dell XPS 13 (9343 model) from work, and first thing I did was wipe the disk, and install Ubuntu 14.04. I'm running the latest BIOS, A03.

I did alot of tinkering to get the laptop booting. I discovered that the laptop will not work with UEFI booting. You need to disable secureboot, and boot the install media as a legacy device. Then perform a usual installation.

Once you have installed Ubuntu, check what kernels you have available. For me, I had to boot the 3.16.0-30-generic kernel, as the 0.16.0-36-generic booted to a black screen.

You can either edit the grub configs yourself, or choose to install "Grub customizer" (https://launchpad.net/grub-customizer) to fix which version you boot.

Bonus info: I also had trouble with the touchpad (not able to click and hold, and right click was messed up), and letters going missing on the screen. I fixed touchpad by telling synaptics it's a clickpad, and I fixed the missing letters by setting intel to "uxa" accellation mode (slower, but works). Edit/add the xorg.conf file, and put the following in it:

/etc/xorg.conf

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad"
    Driver "synaptics"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Option "ClickPad" "true"
EndSection

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
EndSection

If you use sleep (ex. lid close/open) then you may encounter that touchpad is not working when the computer wakes up. To fix this add this file to /etc/pm/sleep.d/

20_fix-drivers-after-sleep 

case "${1}" in
    resume|thaw)
    modprobe -r i2c_hid
    modprobe i2c_hid
;;
esac

I got most of my help from this helpful blog post and various other sites i cannot recall... http://forthescience.org/blog/2015/03/20/installing_ubuntu_14_04_on_the_new_dell_xps_13/

Morten Jakobsen
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