Alienware 13

This article or section does not follow the
Laptop page guidelines
.
Reason:
Lacks a hardware table and a function keys section (Discuss in
Talk:Alienware 13
)
This article documents configuration and troubleshooting specific to the Alienware 13 laptop.
See the
Installation guide
for general installation instructions.
Installation
Boot the computer and press
F12
to access to the boot menu, from there we select the USB and boot from there.
If you get stuck into a nouveau loop or a black screen, change the
kernel parameters
with
nomodeset
.
Switching Windows from RAID to AHCI mode
The stock installation of Windows is in RAID mode which makes linux unable to see the NVMe disks. However once installed in RAID mode, Windows refuses to boot when the disk is in AHCI mode. You can however fix that by following those steps:
Right-click the Windows Start Menu. Choose
Command Prompt (Admin)
If you don’t see Command Prompt listed, it’s because you have already been updated to a later version of Windows.  If so, use this method instead to get to the Command Prompt:
Click the Start Button and type
cmd
Right-click the result and select
Run as administrator
Type this command and press
Enter
:
bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal
If this command does not work for you, try
bcdedit /set safeboot minimal
Restart the computer and enter BIOS Setup (the key to press varies between systems).
Change the SATA Operation mode to AHCI from either IDE or RAID (again, the language varies).
Save changes and exit Setup and Windows will automatically boot to Safe Mode.
Right-click the Windows Start Menu once more. Choose
Command Prompt (Admin)
.
Type this command and press ENTER:
bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot
If you had to try the alternate command above, you will likely need to do so here also:
bcdedit /deletevalue safeboot
Reboot once more and Windows will automatically start with AHCI drivers enabled.
Source:
[1]
Touchpad
If the touchpad does not work, try to unload the
i2c_hid
module:
# modprobe -r i2c_hid
and restart the graphical environment. If that helps, consider
blacklisting
the module.
Wireless
The WiFi network of the Alienware 13 is a Atheros Qualcomm Killer N1525, which is not configured by the default installation. See the
ubuntu bug
.
Fortunately, the following patch is able to get it to work. It was tested on Kernel 4.2.5-1 as follows:
$ git clone
https://github.com/sumdog/ath10k-firmware
# cp -a ath10k-firmware/ath10k/QCA6174 /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174
# echo "options ath10k_core skip_otp=y" | tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/ath10k.conf
After a reboot, wireless should work, including WiFi AC speeds.
For Alienware 13 R3, the WiFi works out of the box. The following kernel error seems to be harmless.
ath10k_pci 0000:3d:00.0: could not fetch firmware file 'ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-5.bin': -2
R1 freezes on suspend/hibernate
Due to firmware crashes with the ath10 WiFi driver on R1 you may encounter system freezes upon suspend/hibernate. A workaround would be to unload the ath10 module before going down and load it back upon wake up.
Create
and make
executable
:
/usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/suspend.sh
#!/bin/bash
if [ "${1}" == "pre" ]; then
   rmmod ath10k_pci ath10k_core
   sleep 1
elif [ "${1}" == "post" ]; then
   modprobe ath10k_pci
fi
Do not forget to do a
daemon-reload
after that.
Note that the nouveau driver also can be the source of problems with suspend, so if the above does not help, try to either blacklist it or install the non-free NVIDIA driver to replace it.
Graphics
The Kaby Lake R3 suffers from a X lockup when either trying to start X or running
lspci
when the discrete GPU is off. There are
kernel bug
and
bumblebee bug
open to track this issue. In the meantime you can add the following to your kernel commandline at boot:
acpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009"
R3 has support for Windows 2012, 2013, 2015. When using 2009, reboot is not available. 2015 works fine and also enables ACPI reboot.
To have switchable graphics see
bumblebee
instructions. The utility is able to turn on and off the dedicated graphics card on demand and without having to restart the computer or reopening session.
It is to be noted that some Alienware laptop (Alienware 13 R3) shows an
lspci hang issue
where
lspci
/
startx
/etc… hangs and freeze the system when probing inactive discrete NVIDIA GPU.
Intel powersaving options
In order to get the most out of your battery life it is recommended to use the following additional powersaving options:
/etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
options i915 enable_fbc=1 enable_guc_loading=1 enable_guc_submission=1 enable_psr=1
Refer to
Dell XPS 13 (9360)#Power saving
for additional information on each of them.
OLED screen brightness
With Gnome, the brightness control keys toggles the on-screen display, but it does not change the brightness level. The screen blanking feature also does not work. The following command can be used to set the brightness to 50%.
$ xrandr --output eDP1 --brightness .5
Until brightness control is supported by the kernel, we can use the following script to read off the brightness values from sysfs and apply xrandr brightness reduction to it:
/usr/local/bin/xbacklightmon
#!/bin/sh

path=/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0

luminance() {
    read -r level < "$path"/actual_brightness
    factor=$((max))
    new_brightness="$(bc -l <<< "scale = 2; $level / $factor")"
    printf '%f\n' $new_brightness
}

read -r max < "$path"/max_brightness

xrandr --output eDP-1 --brightness "$(luminance)"

inotifywait -me modify --format '' "$path"/actual_brightness | while read; do
    xrandr --output eDP-1 --brightness "$(luminance)"
done
Make it
executable
and add it to
autostart
and you are set. We use inotifywait to know when the value is modified so we do not busy wait but are still responsive.
OLED screen does not light up after resume
Sometimes when you sleep the computer and resume it, the OLED screen will flicker but not actually light up again. To fix this use the following xrandr command:
/usr/local/bin/resmon
#!/bin/sh
xrandr -d :0.0 --output eDP-1 --off && xrandr -d :0.0 --output eDP-1 --auto
This is a script so that it can easily run it if the monitor is off after resume: you can add it to a keyboard shortcut, or use run command, whichever is easier.
HDMI/Mini-DP audio
The HDMI and the mini-DP are connected to the NVIDIA card, which means that in order for them to play audio you need to route it through the sound card attached to the NVIDIA device. However by default the GPU has its audio disabled for whatever reason. To enable it follow
NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#No audio over HDMI
Keyboard lights
The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.
Reason:
Setuid
executables can be
very dangerous and vulnerable
. Mentioned repo also has not seen a commit since 2017 (5 years as of writing). (Discuss in
Talk:Alienware 13
)
To get access to the keyboard lights they can be controlling by sending data to the correct device (
ID 187c:0527 Alienware Corporation
)
There are plenty of programs like pyAlienFX or
Alienware-KBL
and none of these work, but the following GitHub project that consists on sending data to USB using
libusb
that worked fine.
$ git clone
https://github.com/snooze6/hack-alienfx
$ make all
In case of a compilation error similar to
"FILE is not defined"
, try adding:
/usr/include/readline/rltypedefs.h
...
#include <stdio.h>
...
Once it is compiled, test by running:
# ./run seq/snooze
and keyboard lights should work.
To register it as a command and can use this program without being root we can do the next:
# cp run /usr/local/bin/
# mkdir /usr/local/fx
# cp seq/* /usr/local/fx
# chmod 4755 /bin/fx
# cp lights.sh /usr/local/bin/lights
# chmod +x /usr/local/bin/lights
Now it should trigger by executing:
$ lights
$ lights on
$ lights off
from a console.
We can simply add the commands to the energy admin or the startup to make keyboard lights change automatically.
If that does not work try
alieneffects-13r3
, specifically made for Alienware 13 R3 or
alienfx
.