Ubuntu on Dell Latitude E6420 with NVidia and Broadcom

My company sold old laptops to employees and I decided to use the chance to get an affordable and legally licensed Windows 10 system - a Dell Latitude E6420. Unfortunately the system has a Broadcom Wifi card and also ships with an NVidia graphics card which require extra work on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus.

After some manual configuration the system works quite well with a power consumption of about 10-15W while writing this blog article. Switching between the Intel and the NVidia graphics card is simple (with a GUI program and requires a logout-login), for most use cases I don't need the NVidia card in any case.

Windows 10 also works well, although it does not support all devices. However, the combined NVidia / Intel graphics systems works better on Windows than on Linux.

In detail, I took the following steps to install an Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 10 dual boot system.

Step-by-Step Installation

Requirements

  • Either a wired network connection or a USB wifi dongle that works in Ubuntu without additional drivers.
  • 4GB USB thumb drive or 2 empty DVDs or 1 re-writable DVD
  • 2 hours time

Install Windows

  1. Update the firmware to version A23 (use the preinstalled Windows 7 for this task)
  2. Go through the BIOS setup. 
    1. Make sure to switch the system to UEFI mode and enable booting off USB or DVD. This really simplifies the multi-OS setup as all operating systems share the same EFI system partition
    2. Download the Windows 10 media creator tool and use it to create a USB drive or DVD
    3. Insert the installation media and start the laptop. Press F12 to open the BIOS menu and select the installation media in the UEFI section.
    4. Install Windows 10. In the hard disk setup simply delete all partitions so that Windows 10 will create its default layout.
    5. Let Windows 10 do its job, rebooting several times. Use the provided Windows 7 product key for Windows 10 and let it activate over the Internet.
    6. All basic drivers will install automatically, some question marks remain in the device manager. Dell does not provide official Windows 10 drivers, so one would have to search the internet for specific solutions. However, Dell provides an overview page for Windows 10 on E6420.

      Install Ubuntu

      1. Create the Ubuntu installation media.
      2. Boot the laptop. Press F12 when it starts and select the installation media in the UEFI section of the BIOS menu.
      3. Select "Install Ubuntu" in the boot menu. Choose to install Ubuntu together with Windows. In the disk partitioning dialog reduce the size of the Windows partition to make room for Ubuntu. Leave Windows at least 50GB, otherwise you won't be able to do much with it.
      4. Let Ubuntu finish its installation and boot into Ubuntu.

      Optimize and Configure Ubuntu

      The default installation needs some additional packages to work well. Make sure that Ubuntu has an internet connection (wired or via a supported USB wifi dongle).

      Note: For the Broadcom WiFi adapter there are several possible drivers in Ubuntu. By default it will install the wl driver which was not working well for me and caused crashes. The b43 driver works for me, although the Wifi performance is rather low.

      Note: The HDMI output of the laptop is connected to the NVidia graphics chip. Therefore you can use it only when the system uses the
      1. Update Ubuntu and reboot:
        sudo apt update
        sudo apt full-upgrade
        sudo reboot
      2. Install the following packages and reboot:
        sudo apt install firmware-b43-installer \
            nvidia-361 nvidia-prime bbswitch-dkms \
            vdpauinfo libvdpau-va-gl1 \
            mesa-utils powertop
      3. Confirm that the builtin WiFi works now.
      4. Add the following line to /etc/rc.local before the exit 0 line:
        powertop --auto-tune
      5. Reboot
      6. Check that 3D acceleration works with NVidia:
        glxinfo | grep renderer\ string
        OpenGL renderer string: NVS 4200M/PCIe/SSE2
      7. Check that VDPAU acceleration works with NVidia:
        vdpauinfo | grep string
        Information string: NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library  361.42  Tue Mar 22 17:29:16 PDT 2016
      8. Open nvidia-settings and switch to the Intel GPU (you will have to confirm with your password):
      9. Logout and log back in. Confirm that 3D acceleration works now:
        glxinfo | grep renderer\ string
        OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Sandybridge Mobile
      10. Confirm that the NVidia graphics card is actually switched off:
        cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch
        0000:01:00.0 OFF
      11. Confirm that VDPAU acceleration works:
        vdpauinfo | grep string
        libva info: VA-API version 0.39.0
        libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
        libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_drv_video.so
        libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_39
        libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
        Information string: OpenGL/VAAPI/libswscale backend for VDPAU
      12. Check that the power consumption is somewhere between 10W and 15W:

      Resources

      PCI Devices (lspci)


      Screen Configuration (NVidia)


      Screen Configuration (Intel)



      Comments

      Post a Comment

      Like this content? You could send me something from my Amazon Wishlist. Need commercial support? Contact me for Consulting Services.

      Popular posts from this blog

      Overriding / Patching Linux System Serial Number

      Image
      I'm a big fan of test driven development  (TDD) for infrastructure components. I'm currently working on a hardware-related topic where we also use the system serial number as identifier. To create a proper integration test, we need to be able to start a system and set the serial number to a known value. This can easily be done with the help of virtual machines like in VMware or VirtualBox , but I couldn't find a way for changing the system serial number on hardware boxes, cloud VMs (e.g. on Alibaba Cloud) or other Linux system. Problem Analysis I was thinking: Linux is the operating system where I can potentially do everything . So how hard can this be? After some digging around I found out that there are those main sources for the serial number on Linux: /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/DMI contains a binary blob of Desktop Management Interface data provided by the kernel and the dmidecode utility is commonly used to decode...
      Read more

      A Login Security Architecture Without Passwords

      Image
      Following up on Lifting the Curse of Static Credentials and Eliminating the Password of Shared Accounts , I have many discussions about why we would benefit from removing password prompts for website logins. Let's dig deeper into the details and show why removing password prompts leads to a  safer security architecture . Update 11.03.2022: Added more details about business vs. consumer websites and additional security suggestions surrounding WebAuthn Problem Space For context, imagine a website that needs to identify online users via their email address. We assume that the website in question is not the primary email system of a user but some other website, e.g. an e-commerce shop system or a collaborative productivity tool. As a User As a user of that website I want to easily sign up for an account have an easy way to login into the account be sure that my account is protected from others or attacks be able to easily recover access to my acco...
      Read more

      Fixing Chrome Color Printing on Linux with HP Color LaserJet M880

      Image
      It seems like I can't get a printer that "just works". I recently decided to replace our HP X476 printer with something nicer and bigger, an HP Color LaserJet M880 ( background story & review in German ). And of course there is something that needs fixing: The Chrome browser on Linux wouldn't let us print in color, even though all other applications had no problem to print in color. Even with Chrome color printing was possible, if one used the system printing dialog instead of the built-in Chrome print preview. This strange behavior of course piqued my curiosity. After some digging around I found out that the Chrome browser needs to parse and understand  the printer driver PPD! Chrome tries to find out how to configure color or grayscale printing in order to offer the user the choice. If Chrome can't understand the printer driver then it simply doesn't offer the choice between color and grayscale — and then some printer driver default can ch...
      Read more