HP Spectre x360 13-w023dx

Device	Status	Modules
Video	Working	i915
Wireless	Working	iwlwifi
Bluetooth	Working	bluetooth
Audio	Partially working	snd_hda_intel
Touchpad	Working with tweaks	?
Webcam	Working	uvcvideo

This article covers hardware specific configuration of this laptop, some minor issues remain after customization. These can be performed after an installation of Arch Linux has been finished and the machine rebooted into it.

For a general overview of laptop-related articles and recommendations, see Laptop.

Hardware info

Hardware options

This is the model of HP Spectre x360 released in late 2016. Distinctive features include two thunderbolt ports and no digitizer. The main hardware components are

• Intel i7 Kabylake 7500U
• OLED touch screen running at 1920x1080
• 500 GB M.2 SDD
• 16 GB RAM
• 4 speakers

lspci on a 4231

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 5904 (rev 02)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 5916 (rev 02)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Device 1903 (rev 02)
00:13.0 Non-VGA unclassified device: Intel Corporation Device 9d35 (rev 21)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d2f (rev 21)
00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d31 (rev 21)
00:15.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d60 (rev 21)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d3a (rev 21)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d11 (rev f1)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d14 (rev f1)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d18 (rev f1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d58 (rev 21)
00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Device 9d21 (rev 21)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 9d71 (rev 21)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Device 9d23 (rev 21)
01:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 24fd (rev 78)
6d:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device a802 (rev 01)

Installation

Installing arch is straight forward for everything (disable secure boot, F10 for BIOS, F9 for boot options) but one thing: you may have to disable a BIOS option called "fast boot". While this option is activated in BIOS the machine may boot into Windows no matter what you select. If you make to boot into the latest arch ISO (June 2016) on a USB, arch EFI boot menu hangs. After you installed arch on HDD and moved all of M$ Windows to /dev/null, you may activate that option again. Although no difference in boot performance could be observed with the option activated or deactivated.

Issues

Audio

Codec has changed from the previous version, now it's Realtek ALC295:

# aplay -l

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC295 Analog [ALC295 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

In best case scenario just one speaker is going to work. There is a bug for that: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189331

Touchpad

When using synaptics X11 drivers touchpad works but fails to detect palm, which causes problems when typing. Dell XPS13 had similar issue and they fixed it, but HP is not going to do that. Refer to https://github.com/advancingu/XPS13Linux/issues/3

When using libinput drivers palm detection works out of the box.

Multimedia keys

While the keyboard backlight (f5) and airplane mode (f12) keys work without any intervention, the rest of the fn keys will be nonfunctional out of the box (unless your DE/WM provides this functionality). In the case that it does not, this can be remedied with acpid, allowing the screen brightness, volume, and multimedia back/play/forward keys to work.

Hardware names that the acpi event handler recognizes for these buttons are as follows:

# journalctl -f

... ACPI group/action undefined: video/brightnessdown / BRTDN
... ACPI group/action undefined: video/brightnessup / BRTUP
... ACPI group/action undefined: button/mute / MUTE
... ACPI group/action undefined: button/volumedown / VOLDN
... ACPI group/action undefined: button/volumeup / VOLUP
... ACPI group/action undefined: cd/prev / CDPREV
... ACPI group/action undefined: cd/play / CDPLAY
... ACPI group/action undefined: cd/next / CDNEXT

Following the information and examples provided in acpid#Tips and tricks, handlers can be put in /etc/acpi/events/ to perform actions on all of these.

Alternatively, a quick solution to get screen backlight control working with the media keys is to use xfce4-power-manager, selecting Handle display brightness keys in the settings.

Auto Rotation

See Tablet PC#Automatic rotation for common methods of achieving this, as well as here, for a python auto-rotation script specifically written for this laptop.