Installing Fedora 31 on a Dell XPS 15 7590

Published in Linux on Feb 25, 2020

This post is mostly intended to serve as notes to myself in how I set up my Dell XPS 15 7590 with Fedora 31. Hat tip to the author of this post, which inspired the one you're reading now.

  1. Boot into Windows 10.

     

  2. Configure Windows to start in Safe Mode.

     

  3. Make sure you know the password of your Windows administrator account.

     

  4. Restart the computer.

     

  5. At the boot screen, press F8 until the BIOS screen appears.

     

  6. Under the "OTHER OPTIONS" section, select the "BIOS Setup" option.

     

  7. Under Settings > System Configuration > SATA Operation, change the selected option from "RAID On" to "AHCI."

     

  8. Under Settings > Secure Boot > Secure Boot Enabled, uncheck the "Secure Boot Enable" checkbox.

     

  9. Hit the "Apply" button, confirm the changes, and click the "Exit" button.

     

  10. Once Windows boots, use the Cortana search box to access "Device Manager."

     

  11. Under the "IDE ATA/ATAI controllers" section, ensure there's an item that reads "Intel(R) 300 Series Chipset Famly SATA AHCI Controller."

     

  12. Revert the configuration change from step 2 to make Windows start in Safe Mode.

     

  13. Restart the computer.

     

  14. Boot into Windows 10, which should now be back in Normal Mode.

     

  15. Once Windows boots, use the Cortana search box to access "Create and format hard disk partitions."

     

  16. Find "OS (C:)" in the list of partitions, right-click it, and select the "Shrink volume" option.

     

  17. Enter the amount of space you want to free up -- I used 262144 (256 GB) -- then click the "Shrink" button.

     

  18. Put a USB flash drive with Fedora flashed on it -- I used balenaEtcher for this -- into the USB drive.

     

  19. Restart the computer.

     

  20. At the boot screen, press F12 until the BIOS screen appears.

     

  21. Under the "UEFI BOOT" section, select the "UEFI: SMI USB DISK 1100" option.

     

  22. Install Fedora normally. This should automatically use the unallocated partition created during step 17 when the Windows partition was shrunk.

     

  23. Once Fedora has booted, open the "Activities" menu and select the "Software" option.

     

  24. In the Software winow, search for, install, and launch GNOME Tweaks.

     

  25. In GNOME Tweaks, under Keyboard & Mouse > Mouse Click Emulation, select the "Area" option. This enables middle and right click actions on the touchpad.

     

  26. Open Terminal and install the onedrive package: sudo dnf install -y onedrive.

     

  27. Configure onedrive to synchronize files from OneDrive.

     

  28. Docker should already be installed, but in case it's not, follow this article to install it.

     

  29. From Terminal, install the docker-compose package: sudo dnf install -y docker-compose.

     

  30. Download the OpenVPN autologin profile .ovpn file.

     

  31. Open the "Activities" menu, select the "Show Applications" option, then click the "Settings" icon.

     

  32. From the "Settings" window, under the "Network" section, click the "+" button.

     

  33. Select the "Import from file..." option at the bottom, then select the file downloaded in step 30.

     

  34. Next to the added VPN entry, click the gear icon.

     

  35. Select the "IPv4" tab, then check the "Use this connection only for resources on its network" checkbox. Hat tip to this post for this solution, without which anything not on the VPN may be inaccessible.

     

  36. Install packages to enable Firefox to stream video.

    dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/{free/fedora/rpmfusion-free,nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree}-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
dnf install gstreamer1-libav gstreamer1-plugins-ugly unrar compat-ffmpeg28 ffmpeg-libs 
     

  37. Install snap, then use it to install Spotify. A restart may be needed if Spotify isn't immediately visible. When Spotify does launch, use Ctrl+= to increase the UI size to a usable value.

    dnf install snapd
snap install spotify 
     

  38. Install Slack and Visual Studio Code.