I run a bunch of Dell laptops on various OpenSuse releases.
In September I bought a top spec Dell XPS 13. An absolutely awesome machine, which I selected because Linux was ‘supported’. Well, Ubuntu was but that’s no use to me. I installed Leap (whatever version it was at the time) and a bunch of hardware devices didn’t work. (Bluetooth mouse? Sound? I can’t remember now but it was disappointing.)
I read something that suggested Tumbleweed might work so I tried it. EVERYTHING WORKED! This gorgeous laptop was fully functional.
A little while later, after an update, the mouse stopped working. I discovered that Bluetooth wouldn’t turn on.
I found a post relating to TLP, which suggested that disabling it would fix Bluetooth. I changed the first line of /etc/default/tlp to set the enable to 0. My Bluetooth mouse connected and worked again. I’ve tried to figure out if there are any side effects to this change but found nothing obvious.
So, something is probably degraded without TLP but my mouse works again.
Then shortly after that, the power switch stopped working. I could no longer suspend by pressing power. The hardware was fine; it still worked for power on/off functions but software was now ignoring it. I re-enabled TLP but that wasn’t the problem.
Yesterday, I installed Tumbleweed on an old Dell Latitude which has been working brilliantly well for years on an old version of Leap. The power switch on that has now stopped working.
In summary:
TLP seams to break Bluetooth (BLE?).
Tumbleweed is killing the power switch.
If anyone has any info on how I can fix these, I’d be very grateful.
Thanks.
This Bluetooth/TLP thing has been a problem for weeks and the day after I decide to post about it, it’s fixed!
So that’s pretty cool.
The power button suspend function is still broken, though. The power button is generally ignored when the system is up but occasionally will instantly power off the machine without warning.
The power button suspend function is still broken, though. The power button is generally ignored when the system is up but occasionally will instantly power off the machine without warning.
If you have ‘xev’ installed, you can run a command of the same name to enumerate key press/release events. That would at least let you know if such events are generated when the power button is pressed briefly.
FWIW, here’s a Dell thread describing similar behaviour for a particular Dell model…
A user found that it wasn’t working with their Debian install, but was with Ubuntu apparently.
