Solved Dell Inspiron 15R 5537 UEFI and hardware drivers

[Realmscholar]

G'day, I use a Dell Inspiron 15R 5537 laptop and I have installed Debian Wheezy 64-bit with the KDE interface.

UEFI isn't supported. I couldn't get Debian Wheezy to boot with UEFI, the dvd wasn't detected, despite disabling secure boot, I had to disable UEFI by switching to legacy in BIOS settings in order to boot Debian Wheezy and install. Debian Jessie supports UEFI booting.

Touch screen isn't supported. Debian Jessie supports the touch screen.

Intel Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller is supported. AMD Radeon 8670M graphics isn't supported, if I install AMD's drivers it doesn't detect the graphics card and x will fail to start. Debian Jessie supports the AMD graphics card I just followed this guide https://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary and installed firmware-linux-nonfree.

Intel Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller is supported. Microphone isn't supported. I had issues with crackling which was resolved by following this guide. http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-fix ... -gnu-linux

Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102 Ethernet is supported. It worked but I did have a possible missing firmware issue but it was resolved by installing firmware-realtek Intel 7260 WiFi isn't supported. Debian Jessie supports the WiFi but I had to download and install the driver from. http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/iwlwifi

Debian Wheezy is missing support for most of my hardware, how ever I have tested Debian Jessie and while the testing version is stable enough to use, I find that software can break easily when the system updates. I have decided to switch to Ubuntu, I don't like Unity so I have removed it and replaced it with KDE, Full hardware support out of the box only had to install AMD/ATI drivers. What would win me back is full hardware support and 64-Bit wine.

[brian73]

Many thanks for the post on the fix for audio! This fixed audio during video playback (especially bad) and regular music on my Dell Precision 390. I just had to change the below in the above link, not sure what this change does though, but it works! For my own knowledge does anyone know what the 'tsched=0' does? The best I could find is this which gets me in the general ballpark, but I need a "for dummies" version http://askubuntu.com/questions/371595/f ... e-defaults

Fix problems with Glitches, voice skips and crackling In file /etc/pulse/default.pa its necessery to substitute the line;

Code: Select all

load-module module-udev-detect

with

Code: Select all

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

[Realmscholar]

No worries glad I could help, I found this information. Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pulseaudio

The newer implementation of the PulseAudio sound server uses timer-based audio scheduling instead of the traditional, interrupt-driven approach.

Timer-based scheduling may expose issues in some ALSA drivers. On the other hand, other drivers might be glitchy without it on, so check to see what works on your system.

To turn timer-based scheduling off add tsched=0

It turns out that this caused issues in wine for me so I had to change it back, all l I had to change to fix the crackling was the audio sample rate to 44100 Hz.