Alienware M14xR2

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Reason: Needs a hardware table and a function keys section (Discuss in Talk:Alienware M14xR2)

This wiki page documents the configuration and troubleshooting specific to the Alienware M14xR2 laptop.

See the Installation guide for installation instructions.

System Specifications

The M14xR2 base model comes with the following options:

Base model

  • Intel® Core™ i5 or i7
  • 6GB or 8GB or 12GB or 16GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
  • 1GB or 2GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M
  • 1366x768 or 1600x900 WLED TrueLife 14" screen
  • 750GB or 1000GB SATA drives and SSD until 500GB
  • SuperMulti 8x DVD±R/RW or Blu-ray double layer reader BD-ROM, DVD+RW, CD-RW
  • 8 cell Lithium-ion battery (63 W/h)
  • 1,3 megapixel webcap with 2 microphones
  • Optional 4.0 bluetooth
  • Wireless N capable

Ports

  • RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet
  • SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (2x)
  • Hi-Speed USB 2.0 with PowerShare technology
  • Mini display port
  • HDMI 1.4
  • VGA port
  • 9 in 1 card reader
  • Audio jack 1/8" (2x)
  • Input audio jack 1/8" (can be used for 5.1 audio output)
  • Security port

Ethernet

The AR8132 Ethernet controller uses the atl1c module and works out-of-the-box with Linux kernel 3.x. 

# dmesg | grep -i atl1c
[    6.052602] atl1c 0000:07:00.0: version 1.0.1.0-NAPI
[   17.706845] atl1c 0000:07:00.0: irq 48 for MSI/MSI-X

Wireless LAN & Bluetooth

Alienware M14xR2 comes with the AR9462 chipset which provides WLAN and Bluetooth capabilities.

Wireless LAN is working out of the box with the ath9k module

Bluetooth:

Tango-view-fullscreen.pngThis article or section needs expansion.Tango-view-fullscreen.png

Reason: TODO (Discuss in Talk:Alienware M14xR2)

Sound

This computer is using the CA0132 chipset. Alsa should work out of the box except for some bugs.

For those using 3.8 kernel note that card sometimes will do random noise that can be fixed by reloading the corresponding module saying that buffer position should be fixed: 

# rmmod snd_hda_intel
# modprobe snd_hda_intel position_fix=1

If you lose sound after system wake you can recover it by rebooting into Windows and booting Linux again. This may have to do with a firmware problem. There is also no headphone detection.

In kernel 3.9 firmware problem seems to be fixed and headphone detection is working (If speakers do not automute go to alsamixer and unmute HP/Speaker Auto Detect). A lot of channels and fx were added to alsa. Automute only works with the one headphone and microphone jack and not with the earphones jack. This should be reported.

Touchpad

Works out of the box. See Synaptics

Video

Since kernel 3.5, PRIME technology is officially supported by the Nouveau graphic drivers. This means that the Nvidia Optimus GPU used in this computer is supported. You need to install bumblebee to let vgaswitcheroo disable your graphics card.

In kernel 3.7 power managing methods were added, so battery life increased a lot.

Kernel 3.10 is coming with a lot of fixes in the Nouveau driver for our NVE0 (Kepler) graphics card. We are expecting a lot of power management improvements.

Control of the light colors

Supported by alienware-kbl a software to manage the light colors with a graphical interface, python or bash commands.

BIOS

Current latest version is A12 from InsydeH20.

The updater provided by Dell is windows only. If you want to update and you do not have Windows I recomend you using HirensBoot CD and Unetbooting for creating an Windows Live USB in order to flash the bios.

It contains the flasing utility and the update file (isflashWin.bin). WARNING: This file should not be used with the DOS flashit utility! As it seems this file is an MSDOS executable file which holds LZMA data inside. I could never get it working.