Dell Latitude 7440

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Reason: missing some IDs in the hardware table (Discuss in Talk:Dell Latitude 7440)
Hardware PCI/USB ID Working?
Touchpad 0488:104A Yes
Keyboard 0001:0001 Yes
GPU 8086:46a6 Yes
Webcam Partially
Bluetooth 8087:0033 Yes
Audio 8086:51c8 Yes
Wireless 8086:51f0 Yes
Fingerprint reader 0a5c:5843 Yes
TPM untested
Touchscreen Yes
Fn Keys Yes
Suspend to RAM Yes
Suspend to disk untested

Installation

As of mid 2023, installation from USB medium is relatively smooth except for the webcam driver, which is currently barely supported and only works through a workaround that is extremely tedious to install. It does work though, see below.

Graphics

Do not install the xf86-video-intel package: it makes things worse, as you can verify using glxgears from the mesa-demos package.

Audio

Audio (both speakers and microphone) works out of the box. You might have to unmute the speakers and/or the microphone using e.g. pavucontrol.

Disks

Disks are recognized in AHCI mode. RAID mode untested.

Touchpad

Works out of the box, but without some essential gestures (e.g. paste from primary clipboard with three-finger tap). In Xorg, you can use libinput to activate the tap paste, and then create an Xorg configuration file to save the setting across reboots, e.g.:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-enable-touchpad-tapping.conf
Section "InputClass"
	Identifier "VEN_0488:00 0488:104A Touchpad"
	MatchIsTouchpad "on"
	MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
	MatchDriver "libinput"
	Option "Tapping" "1"
EndSection

Webcam

Works but requires tedious installation of drivers, firmware and other software. To make a long story short, Intel decided to ship IPU6/MIPI webcams including the one on this laptop without first upstreaming drivers into the linux kernel. It then turned out that the camera requires not just a driver, but a whole separate substack because certain operations that are typically performed within the camera silicon are now delegated to the CPU/GPU. Dell ships Ubuntu "certified" laptops with this camera using a workaround that creates a "virtual camera", but the code is scattered across multiple packages, several of which require custom PKGBUILDs. A recipe to get it working as of kernel 6.4.2 is listed here.

Efforts are under way by Intel and the Linux kernel community to support this webcam out of the box, but it might take a year or two (i.e. 2024-2025).

Fingerprint reader

libfprint-2-tod1-broadcomAUR is required for the fingerprint reader to be working. The package fprintd needs to be installed as well, as described in Fprint.

Firmware

Dell provides firmware updates that can be installed automatically using fwupd.

It is possible to install custom Secure Boot root keys in the BIOS and use them for Secure Boot with Linux.

Function keys

Key Visible?1 Marked?2 Effect
Fn+Esc No Yes Toggles Fn lock
Fn+F1 Yes Yes XF86AudioMute
Fn+F2 Yes Yes XF86AudioLowerVolume3
Fn+F3 Yes Yes XF86AudioRaiseVolume3
Fn+F4 Yes Yes F204
Fn+F5 Yes Yes Toggle Keyboard Backlight Brightness 0%/50%/100%
Fn+F6 Yes Yes XF86MonBrightnessDown3
Fn+F7 Yes Yes XF86MonBrightnessUp3
Fn+F8 Yes Wrong marking It appears to be SuperL
Fn+F9 No No None
Fn+F10 Yes Yes PrintScreen
Fn+F11 Yes Yes Home
Fn+F12 Yes Yes End
Fn+Up Yes Yes PageUp
Fn+Down Yes Yes PageDown
Fn+Left Yes No Home
Fn+Right Yes No End
Fn+Ctrl Yes Yes XF86MenuKB
Fn+B Yes No Pause
Fn+S Yes No Scroll Lock
Fn+R Yes No SysRq
Fn+Ctrl+B Yes No Break
  1. The key is visible to xev and similar tools.
  2. The physical key has a symbol on it, which describes its function.
  3. Keypress is best handled via ACPI events, e.g. the acpid package/service.
  4. Keypress is only recognized via ACPI (e.g. acpi_listen as button/f20 F20. User reports it used to be recognized as X86MicrophoneMute on a fresh installation, but it somehow does not work anymore.

Accessibility

Note: Blind users should request the help of a sighted person to change firmware settings.

BIOS Settings overview

The "BIOS Settings" interface can be reached by pressing F2 during POST.

The BIOS settings page itself is GUI based. There is a panel taking approximately 20% of the screen on the left, containing various sub-categories of settings. The main panel takes 80% of the screen to the right, and contains the settings associated with each sub-category. The font is relatively large, and toggle switches will appear as light grey if set to 'off', and turn light blue if set to 'on'.

The BIOS can be updated through the "One-Time Boot Menu" (press F12 during POST).

BIOS Settings navigation

The "BIOS Settings" interface can be navigated using a keyboard, or mouse - with mouse being the preferred mode. Keyboard navigation keys are as follows:

Key Effect
Up Moves to the previous field.
Down Moves to the next field.
Enter Selects a value in the selected field (if applicable) or follow the link in the field.
Space Expands or collapses a drop-down list, if applicable.
Tab Moves to the next focus area
PageUp Scrolls the currently selected view up.
PageDown Scrolls the currently selected view down.
Esc Moves to the previous page until you view the main screen. Pressing Esc in the main screen displays a message that prompts you to save any unsaved changes and restarts the system.

Diagnostics

Pressing F12 during POST starts the "One-Time Boot Menu" (if enabled in BIOS). There the diagnostic option can be found, which offers various thorough on-board tests.

If d is held while powering on, the "Display panel built-in self-test" (LCD-BIST) is initiated. The screen will cycle three times through solid colors before powering off again. This can be used to make sure all colors are displayed correctly without distortions and no dead pixels are present.

See also