I decided to try to save some dough and reuse 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3L memory I had, as well as reuse a SanDisk Extreme 480GB SATA SSD and a Mushkin 120GB mSATA SSD, all from my late and lamented Dell Inspiron 15R Special Edition (2012). ZaReason was amenable to this, and actually delivered a laptop to me without any memory or storage.
In retrospect, I should have just gone with their components. For one thing, I blew up my memory during the install. Well, it died sometime between when I ripped out of the obstreperous Gigabyte lappy and I installed it in the new Verix system. The system booted fine and brought up the GRUB menu both on my SSD and from the live Kubuntu 14.10 stick. But, trying to load an OS choked with kernel panics, and a subsequent mem test immediately barfed out tons of errors (red lines in MemTest86 are bad).
After a quick trip to Frys, and an eternal wait for them to actually find the memory in their little locked electronics wire bunker, I was back in business. The Verix is easy to get out, with only 6 screws to undo and then easing the plastic tabs out to get access to the bottom of the laptop. The two 2.5" SATA slots are there, as well as 2 of the memory slots. But, I couldn't find the other two memory slots or the mSATA slot.
I think those are actually under the keyboard, but I couldn't figure out how to actually get it off. I can see the tabs above the F-key row on the keyboard. I have to insert some implement into the tabs to force the keyboard out of the tray... but I can't figure out how. Oh, well.
The problem with adding the memory from the base of the computer is the memory slots are partially covered by the heatpipe from the 970M. Ugh. Here's a picture:
You can see the two empty SO-DIMM slots to the left of the big-ass heatsink. This was more of a pain than I expected. It took some time and patience, but I did finally get them installed:
It all came up fine. The mem test went fine, the Kubuntu install was easy. Woo-hoo!
At this point it was running Nouveau and doing OK. I did an update, an upgrade, then a dist-upgrade and rebooted. Yeah, yeah, I probably didn't have to reboot... but there were some messages on the Interwebz indicating people had encountered problems installing nVidia binaries without doing HARD shutdowns in between.
Then came adding the xorg-edgers PPA and doing another update. Another reboot, then going into a TTY (X didn't come up), running nvidia-xconfig to generate a default X.org config file... and here I am! glxgears is rocking around 11K FPS (with anti-aliasing and font smoothing turned off...), and the display is nice. Yeah, it's REALLY big, but the sound is also fine. I can't complain.
Not all's perfect, though it is pretty durn good.
I've been having an odd "pause" problem where the display seems to freeze for a period of time. Turns out it was related to my trackpad... but more on that later.
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