Running Linux on the EZBook 2?

[GilDev]

Okay I don’t have my EzBook 2 with me right now but I will in a few days. Please tell me if I’m wrong.

I had success before booting Linux from an USB drive by going to the boot manager of the BIOS.

So, if I want to install the Lubuntu 17.10 Jump gave on a USB 3 drive without removing Windows, I guess I need to write this image to an USB drive, boot on it like I did before (by going in the boot manager by pressing escape at boot) and install Lubuntu on my other USB 3 drive.

Then, will I be able to boot directly on it via the boot manager (just to try) or do I really need to install rEFInd, since the installation drive would have booted fine?

[Jump]

GilDev wrote:

Okay I don’t have my EzBook 2 with me right now but I will in a few days. Please tell me if I’m wrong. I had success before booting Linux from an USB drive by going to the boot manager of the BIOS. So, if I want to install the Lubuntu 17.10 Jump gave on a USB 3 drive without removing Windows, I guess I need to write this image to an USB drive, boot on it like I did before (by going in the boot manager by pressing escape at boot) and install Lubuntu on my other USB 3 drive. Then, will I be able to boot directly on it via the boot manager (just to try) or do I really need to install rEFInd, since the installation drive would have booted fine?

That’s exactly what I’ve done.
I made a bootable usb with Lubuntu (using Rufus on windows), booted it (by going in the boot manager by pressing escape at boot) and installed it on another USB 3, because I wanted to keep windows 10 on main drive.
The problem was that I could not boot the USB 3 with lubuntu via the boot manager, because when I tried it booted on EFI shell.
I solved by installing REFind on windows, and I don’t have any problems now.

You could try to boot usb with lubuntu from boot manager. If it works for you, you’re done, that was easy! Otherwise install refind with this guide, it’s pretty easy 😉 http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#window

[GilDev]

Thanks a lot, Jump! =)

I’ll try that as soon as I can. Even if I am able to boot my Lubuntu drive from the boot manager, it still isn’t very practical I guess. rEFInd gives a nice interface to choose where to boot from and could also be nice if I want to easily try other Linuxium distributions in the future.

[Jump]

GilDev wrote:

Thanks a lot, Jump! =) I’ll try that as soon as I can. Even if I am able to boot my Lubuntu drive from the boot manager, it still isn’t very practical I guess. rEFInd gives a nice interface to choose where to boot from and could also be nice if I want to easily try other Linuxium distributions in the future.

Exactly! 🙂
This is how REFInd looks when you boot, if you’re curious. (There are a lot of themes, the one I’m using is Regular theme )

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[GilDev]

Would rEFInd installed on a USB drive boot using the boot manager?

I remember I made a rEFInd USB drive like this a few years ago for my Mac.

[Jump]

GilDev wrote:

Would rEFInd installed on a USB drive boot using the boot manager? I remember I made a rEFInd USB drive like this a few years ago for my Mac.

In theory it should work, however when I tried, the REFind USB could not see my USB 3 with linux, hence I wasn’t able to boot. I don’t know why it didn’t work.
As I said, the only method that worked for me without problems was installing REFind on win.
You could always try though 🙂

[Wolf]

Michael wrote:

I can’t find the touchpad model so I’ve uploaded pictures from device manager and a hardware info dump from “System Information” tool.

Well, as I mentionend above it is the internal Mice driver.
As you can see in your screenshot 3 in the middle there are 2 mice drivers, one for the internal trackpad and another one for a USB mouse.

You have to take the other, the internal one and to update these drivers as mentioned by the first post regarding that ELAN driver.

#1 you should download and unzip that ELAN cab file
#2 copy that complete folder for later
#3 start device manager by typing device manager
#4 find and click on the “mice and other pointing devices” section
#5 click on first HID compliant device – then right click – properties – Here you should see a location called “on USB input device”
If that is the case now click on the other HID compliant device – right click – properties – then click on tab DRIVER
#6 Here click on UPDATE DRIVER and then “browse my computer for driver software”
#7 now insert the path to the driver you had copied above
#8 then NEXT and a few other easy steps

Finally it will need a reboot.

After that reboot type touchpad and choose “turn of touchpad right clicking”

Here you will see the precise driver settings that are new and partly work – except 3 and more finger gestures.

Is it really better?

At least it feels better – but is still not good regarding the precision for example hitting an “x” on a chrome tab to close that tab.
Can become really annoying if the cursor jumps in the last tenth of a second a bit away while pressing down cause the click will then not hit that “closing x” instead it will focus on the current or next tab.

Better, but not good and far away from great.

Good luck - WOLF

[GilDev]

Alright thank you Jump. No luck booting from the micro SD slot?

[Jump]

GilDev wrote:

Alright thank you Jump. No luck booting from the micro SD slot?

Nope, that was the first thing I tried, MicroSD with linux installed does not show up in BIOS boot manager.
However that was before I installed REFInd. I haven’t tried to boot MicroSD from REFind, as I switched to USB.

[GilDev]

Well that’s something I will have to try. =)

I’ll report back here what happens.

[c chandel]

Hi,

I’ve been running arch linux on this device for some time now. I’m using the latest mainline kernel 4.13-rc7.

The following don’t work :-

a) Touchpad

b) Wifi / Bt

c) Sound

Everything else  works fine, including suspend.

The touchpad seems a non standard device and is not supported by libinput. Sound needs es8316 support which is available in the kernel (4.13) but probably needs more configuration.

I’m primarily interested in the wifi for now. I can’t find the /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/nvram-74b00bd9-805a-4d61-b51f-43268123d113 file. Apparently that needs to be copied to /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43241b4–sdio.txt fot the wifi to work.

Can someone please upload this file somewhere I can access?

Thanks.

[GilDev]

Alright tonight I’ve put Lubuntu on a USB drive. Touchpad wasn’t working but I was able to install it on another USB 3.0 drive with an external mouse.

At the end of the installation, I got an error message where it couldn’t install a file related to GRUB. I only did a 2 GB swap partition and an ext4 root partition with the remaining space, installing the bootloader directly on the drive (/dev/sda for me). After that, at the same time it told me that the installer crashed and the installation was finished… Who should I belive? =)

The boot manager doesn’t detect the newly installed Lubuntu on the USB drive, but having the drive plugged in seems to slow the boot manager’s startup time quite a lot. Maybe it’s because it’s searching in all the 32 GB drive a boot point.

I then have put rEFInd on another USB drive, booted on it with the boot manager but if my Lubuntu drive is plugged in, all I get is a black screen with a fixed cursor, and after quite some time, the computer reboots. If the Lubuntu drive isn’t plugged in, rEFInd shows up. Plugging in the Lubuntu drive back does nothing, I don’t know if rEFInd auto-refresh the OS list when something is plugged in.

So Jump, did you have a similar experience, especially the error at the end of Lubuntu’s installation? What is your partition layout? Now I guess I’m going to try installing rEFInd directly onto the computer.

EDIT: I’ve rebooted with everything plugged in, boot manager loaded quite fast, rEFInd too and it showed my Lubuntu drive and I was able to boot on it. Woot! I think the next thing is to try installing Lubuntu onto the internal SD and see if rEFInd likes it. Then, I’ll probably end up installing rEFInd to the computer anyway to make things easier. Altough it would be nice to install it on a small partition of my Lubuntu drive, just for testing a bit.

EDIT2: Okay so touchpad, WiFi, Bluetooth and probably sound doesn’t work. What is happening? I don’t think that’s related on where rEFInd is used…

[Jump]

GilDev wrote:

Alright tonight I’ve put Lubuntu on a USB drive. Touchpad wasn’t working but I was able to install it on another USB 3.0 drive with an external mouse. At the end of the installation, I got an error message where it couldn’t install a file related to GRUB. I only did a 2 GB swap partition and an ext4 root partition with the remaining space, installing the bootloader directly on the drive (/dev/sda for me). After that, at the same time it told me that the installer crashed and the installation was finished… Who should I belive? =) The boot manager doesn’t detect the newly installed Lubuntu on the USB drive, but having the drive plugged in seems to slow the boot manager’s startup time quite a lot. Maybe it’s because it’s searching in all the 32 GB drive a boot point. I then have put rEFInd on another USB drive, booted on it with the boot manager but if my Lubuntu drive is plugged in, all I get is a black screen with a fixed cursor, and after quite some time, the computer reboots. If the Lubuntu drive isn’t plugged in, rEFInd shows up. Plugging in the Lubuntu drive back does nothing, I don’t know if rEFInd auto-refresh the OS list when something is plugged in. So Jump, did you have a similar experience, especially the error at the end of Lubuntu’s installation? What is your partition layout? Now I guess I’m going to try installing rEFInd directly onto the computer. EDIT: I’ve rebooted with everything plugged in, boot manager loaded quite fast, rEFInd too and it showed my Lubuntu drive and I was able to boot on it. Woot! I think the next thing is to try installing Lubuntu onto the internal SD and see if rEFInd likes it. Then, I’ll probably end up installing rEFInd to the computer anyway to make things easier. Altough it would be nice to install it on a small partition of my Lubuntu drive, just for testing a bit. EDIT2: Okay so touchpad, WiFi, Bluetooth and probably sound doesn’t work. What is happening? I don’t think that’s related on where rEFInd is used…

In my opinion you should not remove windows 10, it would be difficult to reinstall it if you ever need it again.

What program did you use to create the bootable USB drive?

What is the name of the ISO file you used? 

When you boot from installation USB drive, TouchPad must work, otherwise there’s something wrong.

I installed lubuntu on a 32GB USB 3.0 lexar without any swap partition, just 1 ext4 partition with mount point / .  I installed bootloader on /dev/sdb (the main USB 3 partition) although grub never worked.

I don’t know why you have problems with wifi, trackpad and Bluetooth, I personally installed and tested Ubuntu and Lubuntu from the link I posted earlier (Linuxium) on my Jumper ezbook 2 and everything (except audio) works out of the box.

I thing that every ezbook 2 is the same, there are not different hardware revisions, are they? My CPU is Intel Atom x5-Z8300, yours?

One thing you could try is to install lubuntu on the USB from another computer or from VirtualBox, and than boot the USB on the ezbook 2. I did have one problem finishing the installation once, the Jumper screen went black and wouldn’t turn back on during install,  and I solved with VirtualBox. I booted the ISO on a virtual machine and selected the USB as install drive.

[GilDev]

Sure, I want to keep Windows. Although it’s too bad we don’t have a Windows ISO for this computer.

I have written the image with dd. I wrote a lot of images like this in the past. I only tried with the “linuxium-v4.13-rc2-lubuntu-17.10-alpha2-desktop-amd64.iso” you provided. I got the same CPU as you.

I tried again a few times (this time with only one root partition), but I still get this error at the end of the install: “The ‘grub-efi-amd64-signed’ package failed to install into /target/. Without the GRUB boot loader, the installed system will not boot.”, then then installer crashes. At all times, the touchpad doesn’t work, on the Lubuntu installer drive and on the Lubuntu installed drive. I tried with different USB drives.

Your advice on using VirtualBox is a great idea, but when I try, it gets really slow with the USB drive plugged in (it’s probably because it works in USB 1.1 mode. For USB 2.0 or 3.0 you need to install some kind of extension package on the client). I’ve set a permanent filter on the USB drive so it only goes on the VM and not my host. While the installer’s partitioning tool detects the USB drive, it won’t let me create a new partition table on it, it just says “Error opening /dev/sda: No media found”.

I’m trying to install the system in French, but I also tried in English

I guess now I will try with the Ubuntu image you provided.

EDIT: Alright the Ubuntu image booted great, but it seems to have rEFInd installed with it because it just launched rEFInd when booting for the drive using the internal boot manager. Sadly, still no touchpad, nor WiFi… What is happening?

[Jump]

GilDev wrote:

Sure, I want to keep Windows. Although it’s too bad we don’t have a Windows ISO for this computer. I have written the image with dd. I wrote a lot of images like this in the past. I only tried with the “linuxium-v4.13-rc2-lubuntu-17.10-alpha2-desktop-amd64.iso” you provided. I got the same CPU as you. I tried again a few times (this time with only one root partition), but I still get this error at the end of the install: “The ‘grub-efi-amd64-signed’ package failed to install into /target/. Without the GRUB boot loader, the installed system will not boot.”, then then installer crashes. At all times, the touchpad doesn’t work, on the Lubuntu installer drive and on the Lubuntu installed drive. I tried with different USB drives. Your advice on using VirtualBox is a great idea, but when I try, it gets really slow with the USB drive plugged in (it’s probably because it works in USB 1.1 mode. For USB 2.0 or 3.0 you need to install some kind of extension package on the client). I’ve set a permanent filter on the USB drive so it only goes on the VM and not my host. While the installer’s partitioning tool detects the USB drive, it won’t let me create a new partition table on it, it just says “Error opening /dev/sda: No media found”. I’m trying to install the system in French, but I also tried in English I guess now I will try with the Ubuntu image you provided. EDIT: Alright the Ubuntu image booted great, but it seems to have rEFInd installed with it because it just launched rEFInd when booting for the drive using the internal boot manager. Sadly, still no touchpad, nor WiFi… What is happening?

VirtualBox needs the Extension Pack, you can download it here. Just click on it and it will install. You’ll be able to properly use USB2 or USB3.

Sadly I have no idea why it does not work on your laptop. It seems you’re doing everything correctly. It would be nice to hear some feedback from someone else.

One last thing you could try is to respin the ISO yourself using the isorespin script on a Linux system (either a real pc or in virtualbox).
1) Download your favourite linux distro from the official website. You can choose one of the following: official desktop 64-bit Ubuntu (http://releases.ubuntu.com), Ubuntu flavoured ISOs (https://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu-flavours), Linux Mint ISOs (https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php), KDE neon ISOs (https://neon.kde.org/download), Peppermint OS (https://peppermintos.com/) and BackBox Linux (https://backbox.org/)
2) Download the script
3) Type in a terminal:
sudo ./isorespin.sh -i OFFICIAL_DISTRO_NAME.iso –atom -u
where OFFICIAL_DISTRO_NAME is the name of the linux distro you downloaded.

It will generate a new ISO compatible with the ezbook2, with wifi bluetooth and trackpad working and with the latest kernel available.
I used it to add Kali Linux packages on Lubuntu 16.04 and it works fine (to me, at least).

Then install the ISO as usual and see if it works. Try to use Rufus for windows to create the bootable usb (using GPT partition scheme for UEFI).

I hope it will fork for you, if not I don’t know what else you can do.

[Author]

Posts