Ubuntu-Certification

Feedback on the Dell Inspiron 7591

Asked by John Federico

I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 7591 with the intention of installing Ubuntu. (Windows 10 was pre-installed. Ubuntu was not an option.) I checked for certification before purchasing. (https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201903-26881)

All the specs listed at the above URL seem to match my PC with the exception of:

* RAM: (Tested: Unknown; Installed: 8 GB, soon to be 32 GB)

* CPU: (Tested: i9-9980HK; Installed: i7-9750H)

* Video: (Tested: GeForce GTX 1650; Installed: GeForce GTX 1050)

...and of course, the kernel, which is not available for download by the public: (Tested: 5.0.0-1016-oem-osp1; Installed: 5.3.0-42-generic)

Everything appears to be stable but the audio output does not work: the default is "Dummy Output." Similarly, no audio input is recognized.

Audio output appeared to work fine during installation (the audio icon in the panel did not say "Dummy Output" when selected).

I have read countless forum posts on fixing this without success.

Out of frustration, I tried installing 19.10 with simillar results. I also tried Manjaro 19.02, just to see if the driver support might be different. Audio output worked though there was no audio input support and the system was just generally unstable.

I know that supporting all types of hardware is a challenging endeavor for Linux distro developers, but that's why I purchased an Ubuntu "certified" system.

I would expect that the certification would be worth something.

Any help toward resolution would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

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Chris Wayne (cwayne) said : 		#1

Hi John,

Firstly, I'm sorry you're having issues, and thank you for letting us know about them. One minor correction is that the oem-osp1 kernel *is* publicly available, simply running `apt install linux-oem-osp1` should take care of it for you. If you don't mind giving that a try, I'd love to hear if that might be able to help you. The different RAM and CPU certainly shouldn't be causing any issues, but I'm a bit worried that the GPU could, as we didn't enable/certify that exact configuration. Can you also let me know if you're using the nvidia proprietary drivers, and if so, which version?

Thanks again and sorry for the trouble!
Chris

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John Federico (gadgetboy) said : 		#2

Hi, Chris.

Thanks for your quick and courteous reply.

I have installed the oem-sop1 kernel as per your suggestion. (I didn't know it it was available to me.) After installation, I rebooted and found both the playback and capture devices to be recognized. However neither functioned.

With respect to the GPU, I have conflicting information. I believe this machine is designed to the use both the onboard Intel GPU and the NVDIA GPU, depending on the workload. Here's the output from ubuntu-drivers devices:

gadgetboy@Inspiron:~$ ubuntu-drivers devices

== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00001C91sv00001028sd00000923bc03sc02i00
vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
driver : nvidia-driver-435 - distro non-free recommended
driver : nvidia-driver-430 - distro non-free
driver : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.3 ==
modalias : pci:v00008086d0000A370sv00008086sd00004030bc02sc80i00
vendor : Intel Corporation
manual_install: True
driver : backport-iwlwifi-dkms - distro free

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John Federico (gadgetboy) said : 		#3

Here is the output of lspci -v | grep VGA:

gadgetboy@Inspiron:~$ lspci -v | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 3e9b (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

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John Federico (gadgetboy) said : 		#4

nvdia-settings indicates that the machine is using 'NVIDIA Performance Mode'.

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John Federico (gadgetboy) said : 		#5

Correction: my particular configuration *has* been certified:

https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201903-26881

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#6

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