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Alienware M11x - Linux


superjcvd

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Hello,

As now the gaming system Steam is available for Linux, I though that would be a good idea to open a new discussion about Linux on Alienware for gaming.

I think Steam will port more and more games on this OS and it is interresting to try it.

I would post my reviews about it in this thread.

For the moment I successfully installed Linux Mint (a nice version of ubuntu)

I need to try Steam and a few games with differents graphical cards drivers.

here are the steps I followed :

  • Choose a good Linux Distribution : Mint is a good choice as it comes from Ubuntu with a few improvments. (ubuntu is supported by Steam and has a huge community)
  • Download Mint : http://www.linuxmint.com
  • Use LiLi USB creator to make a bootable USB Key
  • Install the OS (very easy graphical installer)
  • Reboot
  • Install better Nvidia drivers for your laptop (on command line)
  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
  • apt-get dist-upgrade
  • apt-get install nvidia-313 nvidia-settings
  • Install Steam

Did anybody tried to play on Linux with this Laptop ?

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Hello,

Out of the box the Nvidia Card is allways ON even if you don't use it.

The driver used by default called nouveau has bad performance with some nvidia cards.

If you wan't to play video games with Steam for example, you will need to install proprietary drivers and make Optimus technology work first !

For the moment I successfuly installed nvidia new drivers for Linux (nvidia-313) but I'm not able to make optimus works.

The system use by default INTEL video card but I can't power on the nvidia card at the demand as this is done with Windows

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  • 4 weeks later...

I have been successful in getting optimus working using bumblebee, however, even when using the power management options to turn off the discrete gpu, my battery life drops from around 7 hours in windows (with conservative battery settings and a dim screen) to about 4 hours.

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  • 5 weeks later...

I successfully installed Linux mint 14.1 with bumblebee without too much problems. Everything else works out of the box.

Just be sure to edit /etc/init/bumblebeed.conf:

original:

start on (login-session-start or desktop-session-start)

stop on (desktop-shutdown)

Replace with:

start on (runlevel [2345])

stop on (runlevel [016])

... and everything should work as intended.

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  • 2 months later...

I have always had problems with installing nvidia drivers on my m11x. After installing the drivers in mint 15 olivia the computer starts to run in fallback mode and I can't go back to the other configuration in my recovery partition. it just boots into a shell and i type start mdm and it just goes into fallback mode. I don't know linux well enough to use the shell to restore my os. My graphics card is set to discrete. I don't know what else to do. I've got it working on a previous version of mint and ubuntu but this one is giving me hell. I've tried blacklisting nouveau drivers and still nothing.

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  • 3 years later...

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