- This topic has 21 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated Jan 19-2:09 pm by BobC.
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BobC
Its a lost cause
The BIOS itself is gone, no setup, no boot options, out of warranty, no support
So their fancy frigging windoze BIOS update that they kept nagging me to install destroyed the machine.
Won’t boot from Windoze rescue flashdrive made when new, or CD-ROM, or any Linux flashdrive, and can’t find a file called normal.mod anywhere, after 5 hours of searching every partition /boot/grub/x86_64-efi if its there
Most partitions are unknown filesystem and the instructions for grub rescue don’t help
I’ll take back my words if they help me fix it, but at this point I’ll never buy another Dell. It never gets used because it is so difficult to work with.
caprea
Oh my, this doesn’t sound so good.
Dell has a bios recovery option,though.
https://www.dell.com/support/article/de/de/debsdt1/sln300716/bios-recovery-options-on-a-dell-pc-or-tablet?lang=enYup, tried that…. No change…
I think I figured out how to boot debian
PS: i got the debian boot screen by
set pager=1
set prefix=(hd0,gpt11)/boot/grub
set root=(hd0,gpt11)
insmod normal
normalnote that I left off the /x86_64-efi from the set prefix command, when I saw it had the wrong path with that part doubled on the error
anyway, I used the debian boot menu (debian itself wouldn’t load) to start antix17.1
trying to update antix17.1 and then reinstall grub
Evidently Dell has know about the problem for a year and not done anything to help. I found it on their community forums people with machines similar to mine sold with Ubuntu preloaded. Will try to download the file and install via Ubuntu method if possible.
Then I installed fwupd and downloaded linux firmare updates for a system like mine but that cam e preloaded with Ubuntu. I tried to run it, but it didn’t like my machine probably because it wasn’t the Ubuntu preload version.
So that got me nowhere, so then I used the new antiX grub boot to boot to windows, and downloaded the BIOS update manually and manually installed it under windows. It rebooted and updated it on a blue screen, then rebooted again to the antiX grub boot, and I am now rebooting again back to antiX, and although I can’t see the grub menu words without a magnifier, it all does work again…
OH MY!!!
PSS: Thanks for the help and suggestions. antiX is my favorite distro, and a lot of why is because there are other caring people working on it and running it.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by BobC.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by BobC.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by BobC.
BitJam
Kudos for getting it to work! I am very impressed!
We are planning to give you more options for the grub display (at least on the live system) for antiX-19. You could try adding this code to get larger fonts:
terminal_output console
From the grub command line (oh what joy) the “terminal_output” command with no args should give you a list of possible modes. If you want to set it the “right” way then use
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=”console”
in /etc/default/grub. I think.
Following in the spirit of besides that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? Besides this ridiculous problem what do you think of the xps-15?
PS: I am also curious about other problems you may be having with high resolution. I tried to automatically fix the font size to something reasonable in the consoles. We should start out with a reasonable font size in the bootloaders in antiX-19. This was motivated by my old eyes combined with the teeny default fonts on a 1920×1080 xps-13. Perhaps we can start a new thread.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by BitJam.
Context is worth 80 IQ points -- Alan Kay
Yes, then you can imagine trying to read 3840 x 2160 on 15″
What if we said each line should handle some reasonable number of characters, like between 150 and 200, and find the closest normal font size larger than that at the highest resolution…
3840 / 150 = 25.6
3840 / 200 = 19.2therefore find the largest font where characters at least 19.2 pixels wide but no more than 25.6 pixels wide and you will be able to get at least 150 characters across the screen, and I bet you can at least read it. Adjust numbers for worst case screen allowed, ie if allowing for phone use, maybe 150 characters across minimum is too high.
I don’t use the xps 15 under linux much because its a hassle needing to change things like screen resolution grub and UEFI troubles. It’s wickedly fast running off a 256 gb hi-speed SSD with 16 gb of hi-perf memory, so it’s a shame that I rarely use it. It gets used as a work machine during the day lately running win/10 which is just the most pathetic OS I have ever seen.
I tried the console idea and it changed to the same type of grub menu that debian uses, and I can read it with the magnifying glass or if I put on reading glasses and get within 6 inches away. Without the reading glasses or magnifier its completely not readable.
Ok, found a solution. c from grub menu for command line, tab shows a command called videoinfo, videoinfo says it can do 1024x768x32
added to /etc/default/grub
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keepsave, update-grub, reboot, and presto! a readable grub menu with fancy graphics and all 🙂
- This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by BobC.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by BobC.
BitJam
What if we said each line should handle some reasonable number of characters, like between 150 and 200, and find the closest normal font size larger than that at the highest resolution…
3840 / 150 = 25.6
3840 / 200 = 19.2therefore find the largest font where characters at least 19.2 pixels wide but no more than 25.6 pixels wide and you will be able to get at least 150 characters across the screen, and I bet you can at least read it. Adjust numbers for worst case screen allowed, ie if allowing for phone use, maybe 150 characters across minimum is too high.
That is what I already do for the console! The default is 120 characters wide. You can adjust this with the conwidth=xxxx cheat. But we are limited by the maximum font size. There is also the set-console-width utility to help you change it but I image it already selected the largest font possible on your machine which is Terminus32x16 if you are at max. resolution. But if you are booting into 1024×768 then we, of course, chose a smaller font for you.
I’m really glad you figured out something that worked! I believe the live grub-menu was already limited to 1024×768 to prevent the tiny font problem but I don’t think that carried over to the installed system. We will soon be testing improvements to the live grub display for antiX-19. If you can get your xps-15 to boot from usb then it would be great to get your input (if you are willing/interested).
I may not be able to get it all done but I’ve been trying to make our live system work well with high resolutions displays like yours. It seems clear we need to carry that over to the installed system. My ideal, which may still be a ways off would be to let the machine run at max resolution but enlarge fonts and so on so that it is quite usable at first boot.
I imagine you can set the final resolution of the screen with a cheat like “video=1920×1080” (assuming you have a modesetting video driver). I think my font scaling will work well at that resolution but we still have a lot of work to do with X-windows.
Please email me at bitjam@gmail.com if you want to discuss this further. If you can get your xps-15 to boot from usb then I’d love to have you test some things we are working on. My ideal is to have a machine like yours present usable fonts everywhere on the first live boot.
Context is worth 80 IQ points -- Alan Kay
Yes, bitjam, I’ll be happy to help test. The Dell XPS 15 can boot from flashdrives again, and has plenty of free disk to install to. I have a number of other various systems as well.
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