Ubuntu-Certification

Feedback on the Dell Inspiron 3451 - Iris 14 BTM

Asked by Anthony Vossman

This is a very unstable system and virtually impossible to update/upgrade the Basic Ubuntu packages using any of the standard methods. Due to the Dell OEM hacks and BIOS version, just about any update install that affects the boot-loader or grub will break the system and force the user to do a factory reinstall.. The GUI software updater with Basic Ubuntu packages for grub2 or chain boot will force the restart into a kernel terminal screen of continuous loading failures and this can only be escaped by a button-down exit. The next button push may or may not give you a Grub screen to make repairs or reinstall - otherwise, you need to access the BIOS and do a factory reinstall.. A terminal update is also full of errors that seems to break one or more loading functions, both hardware and software. A downloaded Synaptic manager fails similarly.
All-in-all, this system is very poor and Dell offers no support or website information for it whatsoever, even while it is a brand new factory purchase. I fail to understand why Canonical would approve this Dell product for Ubuntu. I do not recommend this system to anyone and I would suggest that Canonical investigate this situation. The web is full of reports from other customers that have had the same experience with this Dell system and also the Dell XPS Ubuntu product. At the least, I would expect Canonical to encourage Dell to offer some decent support and repair service for this mess.

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Po-Hsu Lin (cypressyew) said : 		#1

Hello,
sorry to hear that, a quick question, was your laptop came with Ubuntu pre-installed on it?
Thanks

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Anthony Vossman (tonyv414) said : 		#2

Yes - it is a dedicated laptop, sold with a pre-load of 14.04 LTS only, and that seems to be the source of all the problems as Dell seems to have proprietarily modified the boot system to suit a previous machine BIOS. I have discovered that I must analyze every bit of the technical details of an update package or additional software package to see how it affects boot and startup before I consider an install. A further problem was caused by the fact that Dell pre-set the updater to accept all Ubuntu downloads, both supported and unsupported - so the initial updater kept installing incompatible and system-breaking code which forced me to recover with a factory reload each time the updater went into update mode. I have now learned my lesson, and unchecked everything in the updater settings except full support, critical and security updated from Canonical only. (but I still review the specific details of each package before accepting install)
I am going to see about wiping this system and doing a fresh install with a Canonical disk - but I will study the BIOS of this Dell machine a bit more to make sure it is ready. Hopefully i can then get rid of any Dell modifications.
The really disappointing thing about this is the lack of support from Dell for this brand new, factory purchased product . The only warranty option seems a return for refund within thirty days.
One last complaint is this - it seems impossible to use Samba to incorporate this machine into my Windows-based home network. I have tried all kinds of configuration modifications to the samba file, but nothing seems to work. My network will just not discover this Ubuntu system nor set up share permissions. So i guess samba is a thing of the past as far as 14.04 is concerned, and I'll just have to go back to file-sharing and transferring by email or cloud service.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#3

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.