For the last three years I have been using Dell Precission m4700 as my primary workstation. Yeaah, its looks like a notebook, but it is heavy and huge – so it is called “mobile workstation” and it is hard to not agree. Unfortunately for several reason I was forced to use this with MS Windows 7 and 10 later on. For those who knows me it is not a surprise, I truly hate MS Windows because of …., well because of many reason. Luckily, this year I got new laptop to work with MS windows software mostly for my work, so I was able to reinstall my old m4700 and do whatever I want.

And that’s how my 3-days adventure become.

Laptop specification you can find there (http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/shared-content~data-sheets~en/documents~dell-precision-m4700-spec-sheet-tab.pdf). Mine is i7, two hard drive and two graphical card (nvidia and intel). Good equipment, but rather nothing unusual nowadays.

I decided to use Linux. I’ve been using Linux for some time now, so I know how to deal with. I am also big fan of FreeBSD for many reason, but I also like to play some games on steam. So I wanted to give a chance to Linux. The first and important decision is distribution, which I will have to live for long time. In my life I have tried a lot of them, debian, mint, ubuntu, fedora, opensuse and all 🙂 the rest.

Anyway, based on my experience and how much time I can spent to solve issue, my assumption was to spend no more than one day to get distro working satisfying. One day means evening after my regular work … and it is not too much. I wanted to have fully working workstation for my personal home usage.

I have been using uncool windows on this workstation so I have some expectation about speed and functionality. And I expected to be better.

1. Debian
   I started with Debian, 9.3 version. Installation itself was pretty forward. No surprises if you know that Debian doesn’t have any proprietary software including drivers and firmwares. Adding one or more of them is not a big deal. In my case I had to install just wifi drivers. I installed btrfs on root partition and before any change I used snapper to create snapshot. Also I used my favorite graphical environment MATE (I know it well from Mint). Overall impression was positive until I started to play around with nvidia drivers.
   I like when drivers are (even those not-opensource) delivered by distribution. And there was. Drivers for nvidia in repository including Bumblebee and nvidia optimus. BUT – installing this drivers doesn’t change anything in the system. Rebooted system was still using intel graphic card. So I stared to search howto change config. At this stage I had 2h left to go sleep.
   First thing I tried was standard “X -configure” which should create xorg configuration for my hardware configuration. Usually this works. But this time I get info. that my graphic cards doesn’t have equal number of display. OK, nothing fancy, broken xorg.conf created. Starting point to fix. But again I got in trouble when I was attempting to run X with this configuration. This time there was no display to run xorg server. Hmmm. OK, what is google for. 20 min of searching and I got necessary xorg config entry. Also quick check of this file and I discovered, there is no nvidia driver section. Quick fix (next 20 minutes) and finally success. Easy on the eye. Thanks to this artice (https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers/Optimus#Identification, https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee) I was able to tune system afterwards. Two graphical card started to work correctly.
   Last step was only to made it work with my external monitor. Easy peasy. We have 2018 it should be not a problem …. Well it was. External monitor shows no signal and display program (system configuration) do not discover new devices. Additionally xrandr started to show odd messages (no information of intel card). OK – time was ending, and I was tired and a bit disgusted. But, it is Debian! Everybody knows that it needs little more tweak at start but after it is rock solid. I decided to download the newest driver from nvidia.com and install them. Not an one click task, but it should be very polished. Hmmm, not this time. nvidia-xconfig stated that my workstation has no other than nvidia network card in my system. Xorg wont start with 2 nvidia card, so again – just a little fix. And it is working. Nvidia drivers make my desktop more detailed, good looking. BUT external monitor still not discoverable caused my decision to go sleep. At last, start fresh in the morning should help me to decide, what distribution will be my next choice.
2. Arch Linux. I have never tried on desktop. But extremely well documented, well scripted. Just download and install. Hmmm, the second part turned out to be difficult one. The installation process itself I have found quite nice. At last, I knew what is happened beside the scenes as the installation process in 90% manual. The problem is that after that, the system doesn’t really start. I used btrfs partition and I thing this was the problem. Grub installation failed despite the fact that it wrote success output. It was impossible to find boot partition (by using uuid) to the kernel as grub claimed the uuid to kernel as parameter that exist nowhere. I have checked the blkid, btrfs uid, grub entry and I have found no such entry which kernel wanted to start. Hmmm, that was the point to go to the different disto which was:
3. Fedora. Taraaa. Why not? Should be good enough. Designed rather for desktop (haven’t seen working on servers), test field for the biggest commercial brother RedHat. Should do the job. To not to dwell too much, fedora was installed successfully but never booted successfully. Don’t know the reason, and to be honest I do not want to know. After I got the kernel panic right in to my face I started to download ubuntu 16.4 lts edition. This was my last hope to have linux and do not break my one day configuration rule.
4. Ubuntu. Finally, it works. It really works. Just installed with option to download third party closed source drivers and software (yeeeah, I know ….), I use special app to download nvidia driver (and kernel microcode -greetings for spectra and meltdown) and it works. I plugged my external hdmi monitor, and it works. I don’t even have to spend the whole afternoon. It took me 3-4 hours to download distro, patch it and install my favourite software. I was never big fan of the Unity (also ubuntu was not a big fan of unity in version 17 😉 ). Anyway Ubuntu has defended (in my case of coruse) the honor of linux.

Summary:

With my rule, one day for distro to make it usable Ubuntu won the game. Of course, someone else more advanced in linux desktop configuration could say that he/she would configure other distro in the same time I did with Ubuntu. Yeah, that would probably be true. But for me the distance between Ubuntu and 3 other distro was so huge that I decided to write this text. From my perspective two graphical cards, two disk shouldn’t be challenging. The reality shows, that even if 2018 it is not so obvious. Don’t get me wrong, I love linux and opesource, gnu, bsd movement and software but still, operating system shouldn’t be challenge in themselves. Should be (important) means to get your target.

My simple, working xorg.conf (ubuntu):

Section "ServerLayout"
 Identifier "layout"
 Screen 0 "nvidia"
 Inactive "intel"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier "intel"
 Driver "modesetting"
 BusID "PCI:0@0:2:0"
 Option "AccelMethod" "None"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "intel"
 Device "intel"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier "nvidia"
 Driver "nvidia"
 BusID "PCI:1@0:0:0"
 Option "ConstrainCursor" "off"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "nvidia"
 Device "nvidia"
 Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration" "on"
 Option "IgnoreDisplayDevices" "CRT"
EndSection