There are likely to be a lot of these XPS13 posts, so I've created a category for them. This is the first post in that category.
Wherein a reinstall is harder than it should be
So I decided to wipe and reinstall my XPS13 for a variety of reasons, most of which boil down to encrypted /home. I found that that process was somewhat more difficult than it could otherwise have been, mostly because a) the Sputnik 3 install image does not have networking support, b) the recovery process doesn't partition correctly, and c) nothing else has networking support, either.
The setup
Let's start with networking support. Apparently, the wifi adapter in the Sputnik 3 is about five and a half minutes old. You have to have a very new kernel, and very new firmware, to get it to work. I have read variously that Linux 3.10 and 3.12 are the requisite kernel versions, and several different comments on firmware blobs. I don't know for sure, I haven't gotten that far. The bottom line is that neither Debian 7 (wheezy) nor Debian testing (jessie) netinst images would work, even with extra non-free firmware packages. That's not entirely unsurprising, but what is surprising is that Dell's own recovery image doesn't appear to have the appropriate driver and/or firmware. This means that you can't install software to the recovery image system.
... Which is unfortunate for me, because the whole point of this exercise was to set up the drive using LVM and LUKS encrypted partitions. Ubuntu 12.04 supports both of these things just fine, just not on the Dell recovery image. Ugh.
Reinstall #1
I decided to do things the “hard” way, leave everything but /home unencrypted, and just set up the encrypted /home partition once the recovery image had done its thing. For this to work, I deleted the partitions I didn't want, created a / partition, a large unused space for LVM, and a swap partition, then installed. The recovery image appeared to be happy, and did its thing for a while. So far so good. Except ...
When the laptop rebooted, it said Operation system not found. Yeah, “Operation system“. The Chinese-to-English translator was sleeping on the job that day, apparently. I had left a small FAT partition on the drive that appeared at a glance to be for UEFI, so I thought maybe it required some updates to get things working. I was a bit confused, though, as the system was configured for legacy boot and I wasn't sure why it would want that partition, anyway. So, figuring I could just do a complete restore (restoring the UEFI and recovery partitions, as well as the Linux install) if things went too wrong, I took the nuclear option.
Reinstall #2, and resolution
I rebooted to the recovery image, wiped the UEFI partition as well, and reinstalled with only the Linux install and empty partition. Same as before, everything appeared to go fine, then reboot, and whoops, no dice.
So I said to myself, “surely it's not as simple as they installed grub to the OS partition and didn't mark it bootable!,” and I rebooted to that !*$@& recovery image AGAIN. I fired up fdisk, marked /dev/sda1 bootable, wrote, and rebooted — without even looking at their GUI. Presto, the annoying setup video played and I was off to the races.
Summary
I'm done jacking with this thing for tonight. We'll see how the rest of the saga goes tomorrow (and maybe I'll write it up). This situation doesn't really significantly damage my opinion of the hardware, as it's obviously still great, but it does give me some pause regarding Dell's commitment to the product. Ubuntu 12.04 is pretty old, there doesn't appear to be a way to install anything newer (at least, without doing some installer futzing) at the moment, and even the Dell installer doesn't really seem to be brought up to speed for the new hardware. It's almost like they shipped with the Sputnik 2 installer and some extra install-time packages.
The charitable part of me hopes that this is because this product is only a month old, and they're already prepping 14.04 for April. Any word on that, Dell?