My Dell XPS 13 developer edition is a lovely machine. It’s slim and light, very very fast and has a beautiful screen. It also came from the manufacturer with Ubuntu linux pre-installed and ready to go. I do wish more manufacturers would sell their computers without Microsoft Windows.
However, it did have a tendency to drop the wireless connection randomly which is surprisingly frustrating. Having never bought a ‘proper’ laptop before I thought I’d make use of the 12 months pro-support that came with it. Sadly, Dell’s representative was asking me Windows related things, so I politely gave up on them. Maybe if I’d persevered they would have put me through to an Ubuntu specialist, maybe not. I suppose the leaflet in the laptop packaging about getting started with Windows 8 should have made me suspicious of what to expect!
Anyway, it turns out that the Atheros Killer wifi card in the machine wasn’t being supported very well by the linux kernel that was shipped with the machine. That doesn’t say much for Dell’s quality assurance testing. All that was needed was for me to install a newer kernel, and the wifi now works perfectly.
I’d like to think that this minor issue will be addressed by Dell, but just in case you’ve got yourself a shiny new XPS 13 Developer Edition with flaky wifi, here’s how to get a newer kernel that works:
Open a terminal (press CTRL+ALT+T) and type:
sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-quantal
Then reboot your laptop.