OpenSUSE LEAP 15.6 on Dell Inspiron 7506 2-in-1
Introduction
Please see previous
article for the first distribution of Linux I used on this
computer.
This article will help you with how to install OpenSUSE LEAP 15.6 on this laptop. But the usual riot act: I am not responsible for anything that happens as a result of you following these instructions. This article is just me telling the story of what worked for me.
| HARDWARE COMPONENTS |
STATUS UNDER LINUX |
NOTES |
| Intel 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7
@ 2.80GHz |
Works |
|
| System Memory: 16GB, 2x8GB, DDR4, 3200MHz | Works |
Upgraded w/ Kingston KCP426SS8/16 (32GB) |
|
Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics with shared graphics memory |
Works |
Works, including HDMI |
| Seagate Technology PLC Device 5012
(Barracuda 510 SSD) (added) |
Works |
|
| 4-Cell Battery, 53WHr | Works |
|
| Dell back-lit keyboard |
Works |
Can change settings in BIOS; can update any
time. |
| Dell 512GB factory Solid State Drive
(removed) |
Works |
|
| Fingerprint Reader (built into power
button) |
Doesn't work | Works in Windows |
| 15.6-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) Truelife Touch
Narrow Border WVA Display with Active Pen support |
Partially works |
Touch input transfers to the other screen;
screen input identifies as "touchpad." |
| Intel Audio |
Works |
See Notes |
Installation
In the first article, I went over how to open the laptop and upgrade items.
In this article, I go over how to OpenSUSE LEAP 15.6. With Mageia, you had to disable Secure Boot, which would also mean you would lose your hard drive encryption. With OpenSUSE LEAP 15.4, you don't have to disable Secure Boot. However, in light of the possibility of having a kernel or GRUB update modify boot files, you need to keep a bookmark on another computer or your phone for how to get to Microsoft's web page to get your hard drive encryption key, in case you get locked out due to Windows panicking.
OpenSUSE LEAP 15.6 installation is mostly
the same as all previous ones. I noticed that now it will
allow you to import users from previous installations, as well
as install your kernels in your LUKS+LVM space (although booting
from this is slower).
I didn't try installing over WiFi.
Note that I did not try the WiFi card during installation.
I found out that a USB-to-ethernet dongle will work for
installation purposes. I am not completely sure if the
onboard WiFi works or not, as I have not been able to
troubleshoot it.
Devices
Here is the output of lspci. As you can see, this more modern kernel (5.4.21) recognizes more of the devices I have.
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 11th Gen Core
Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 01)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel
Corporation TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 01)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel
Corporation TigerLake-LP Dynamic Tuning Processor Participant
(rev 01)
00:07.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
Thunderbolt 4 PCI Express Root Port #0 (rev 01)
00:0a.0 Signal processing controller: Intel
Corporation Tigerlake Telemetry Aggregator Driver (rev 01)
00:0d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Tiger
Lake-LP Thunderbolt 4 USB Controller (rev 01)
00:0d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation Tiger
Lake-LP Thunderbolt 4 NHI #0 (rev 01)
00:12.0 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Tiger
Lake-LP Integrated Sensor Hub (rev 20)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Tiger
Lake-LP USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 20)
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
Shared SRAM (rev 20)
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi
6 AX201 (rev 20)
00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation
Tiger Lake-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 20)
00:15.1 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation
Tiger Lake-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #1 (rev 20)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation
Tiger Lake-LP Management Engine Interface (rev 20)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev 20)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
LPC Controller (rev 20)
00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Intel
Corporation Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio
Controller (rev 20)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
SMBus Controller (rev 20)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation
Tiger Lake-LP SPI Controller (rev 20)
2b:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Kingston
Technology Company, Inc. KC3000/FURY Renegade NVMe SSD E18
(rev 01)
So this kernel seems to work better with my devices.
Sound
You need to install the sof-firmware package
for the Intel soundcard on this laptop to work. Then load
the snd-sof-pci-intel-tgl kernel module. If it continues
to not work, go into Yast and configure the sound card.
Brother MFC-J491DW
This section is actually rather surprising, in a good way. I got this printer after my last one broke. I decided I was going to try to use it over WiFi (my network is secured with a good password). On Windows, configuration with Brother's software was easy. I was hesitant with Linux, however, because of past experiences. But I saw Linux drivers on Brother's website, so I decided to give them a try. There was a shell script available, so I decided, "why not?" I gave it a try. The shell script surprised me: it executed well, did a good job detecting my distribution of Linux, and installing the proper RPMs.
On OpenSUSE LEAP 15.4, I just installed the
RPMs from their website and everything worked, including
scanning.
I strongly recommend Brother printers for Linux installations. However, their Windows drivers aren't so good. I eventually had to start using this printer only on USB because it conflicted with other printer drivers in Windows.
Gnome Keyring
The part about how Gnome takes over
everything is how Chrome and Discord launch the gnome
keyring. I find it annoying, so I removed executable
permissions from all the gnome keyring executables in /usr/bin.
Package-update-indicator
On this version of OpenSUSE LEAP, for some
reason I get a whole bunch of odd behavior from the
package-update-indicator, i.e. the taskbar notification that you
need to update your software. Sometimes it would get
"stuck" saying I needed an update I didn't need, or say that I
need to update something but then when opened just tell me
everything is up to date. I even had to install OpenSUSE
LEAP 15.4 once to try to get it to unstick, as I tried
everything to clear databases and cache on the zypper
program. You may run into problems with it. My
advice is that if/when it causes problems, do your update from
the shell as root.
TMPFS /tmp
On previous versions, you would have to add
a line to make the /tmp directory tmpfs. But with OpenSUSE
Linux 15.4 and following, you can specify the /tmp during
installation. I would recommend making /tmp a tmpfs entry
during installation, especially with a solid state drive, to
save write cycles, as well as to make /tmp more "temporary."
Installing Software
Installing software on OpenSUSE LEAP 15.6 is a good experience and very easy. Nearly everything I need exists in OpenSUSE's repositories, especially seamonkey (unlike Mageia). About the only thing I needed separately was android debug bridge (adb) from the OpenSUSE Build Service.
Some other non-Linux software comes in RPM,
such as Discord and Dropbox. For Dropbox, I install the
nautilus-dropbox RPM from OpenSUSE, but also the RPM from
Dropbox. Nearly every time I load up the OpenSUSE software
installer (since like LEAP 15.1), it asks me if I want to
"break" nautilus-dropbox by ignoring its dependencies or
uninstall it. I always choose to "break" because it's
never affected performance.
Keyboard
Please see previous article for hardware performance of this laptop. Briefly, this keyboard is very good, even if it has the number pad, which I am not a fan of.
Touch Input and Screen
The screen looks absolutely flawless in
Linux, just like in Windows. And touch input works in
Linux as well, which is a very good thing. With OpenSUSE
LEAP 15.4, for some reason when you plug in a second monitor
over HDMI, touch now responds on the other screen. I have
not had a chance to test it with LEAP 15.6.
Webcam
The webcam works in Linux with Cheese.
And I am very pleased with the Dell privacy feature that is
included. It doesn't turn off webcam video, but it covers
the camera. In Linux you can swatch the dark black shutter
move if you move it slowly.
Battery
In Linux, it gets a claimed 6 hours, even 10
hours if I am only sitting in a classroom using a text editor to
take notes. I'm still working on learning more tricks for
extending the battery life, but I recommend using the PowerTop
command to auto-tune some of the variables that help increase
battery life.
Tablet / Tent Mode
In Windows, this mode works. I'm new to 2-in-1 laptops (and this was a gift from Dell, i.e. I didn't originally order a 2-in-1). But it works very, very well in Windows. It didn't come with a stylus pen for the touch screen, however.
However, in OpenSUSE LEAP 15.6, as of the
time I wrote this, changing the orientation of the laptop does
not work: the screen does not "flip over."
The keyboard automatically shuts off when
one goes to tablet or tent mode, so apparently that function is
based in hardware. However, apparently the sensor that
tells the OS what position the laptop is in (for screen
rotation) is not yet recognized or acted upon in XFCE or Gnome.
Fingerprint Reader
This computer has a fingerprint
reader. It works in Windows. However, last time I
tried to enable it (previous laptop 2 months ago) Windows 10
made me input a PIN in order to input a fingerprint, which is
(in my opinion) absolute garbage. PINs are less secure
than passwords and fingerprints. Since then, I have begun
using YubiKeys for login, which is more secure (Windows and
Linux both).
OpenSUSE LEAP 15.6 has a Goodix fingerprint
reader module. I will continue to test to see if I can get
it to work with XFCE....
Sensors
I added the XFCE sensors plugin and enabled
all the options (sensors) inside of it to see how many sensors
the computer manifests over SMBus/I2C/serial. There are 11
sensors, unlike my last laptop.
What To Do When Microsoft Locks You Out Of Linux
This part is from my experience with OpenSUSE LEAP 15.2. I include it just in case you run into this problem at any time.
So you ran a Dell OS Recovery update (a Windows
update) and then Linux didn't boot? Let me relate my
experience with this on a previous laptop. Some of the
steps below won't matter.
So anyways, make sure your Microsoft account
works BEFORE you do anything. And make
sure you REGULARLY BACK UP YOUR FILES.
I then booted up Linux. Because my Inspiron laptop is still so new, the new Intel iRIS graphics didn't work with GParted Live, so I had to install OpenSUSE (MAKING SURE I created a partition in the second larger area of free space, i.e. the second half of the 1TB drive because I had burned the 512GB image to the 1TB which left 512GB of empty space). I installed OpenSUSE with gnome just to jump on WiFI, install GParted, and then move the recovery partitions over so that all the free space was at the end of the drive. Then I rebooted into the OpenSUSE installer again and deleted the original installation and reinstalled using my typical LUKS encrypted configuration.
When I rebooted, Windows 10 did not start but took me to the BitLocker unlock key page. I logged into the Microsoft BitLocker recovery keys page and typed in the long password. When I first saw this page, I went to log in using my phone and the page disappeared: my laptop shut down. This seems to be a time-out protection or something, so I wouldn't let that bother you.
Now GRUB2 boots up and lets me select Windows 10 and Windows works fine. This is a lot of complex work but it was worth it, I think.
Do not save your unlock key anywhere except in another encrypted container (and not in the BitLocker one is using). Or better yet: don't save it at all. Log in every time or disable BitLocker.
Keep in mind, you may get a BitLocker unlock page rather often with Linux, if the InitRD or Kernel is updated. It shouldn't cause your BIOS to go back to RAID mode for the onboard SSD, but a Dell OS Recovery update might do that. Some people might want to disable Dell's auto-update and/or Windows auto-update to prevent the OS Recovery from being updated before they've had a chance to back up all their files. I would recommend daily incremental backups of your data.
I've noticed that some Dell updates like BIOS updates, however, even though they request that BitLocker be temporarily suspended, don't seem to cause me to get locked out of Linux, thankfully....