Installing Neon on Ideapad s205 - Some issues & questions with boot loader

[David Hurka]

Hi everyone,

I “successfully” installed KDE Neon on a Lenovo Ideapad s205. This computer is known for its insane BIOS problems, which make installation of Linux painful.

I have attached a file about my experiences.

Now I have two issues remaining, can anyone here help?

1. I could generate grub.cfg, but Grub does not load it automatically. I have to load it everytime from the grub command line. Is it possible to fix that? (Probably only from within the grub command line itself?)

2. The installer (ubiquity kde_ui) always crashes when it tries to install the boot loader. It says that it was not possible to access something or so, but in fact, the boot loader is installed now. The problem is, that the resulting OS is somewhat broken, probably because the installation didn’t complete. I will fix some hardware problems now, and then try to install Neon again using ubiquity --no-bootloader kde_ui. Will this solve all problems regarding the broken OS installation?

Nevertheless, thanks for providing Neon!

Cheers,
David Hurka
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== How to install KDE Neon on Lenovo Ideapad s205 notes ==

In live system / installer:
– Create a gpt partition table on the HDD.
– Create a 512MB FAT16 partition for grub.
– Create another partition for Neon.

Run installation. -> Will warn about not being able to install grub, and crash.

Reboot -> GNU Grub 2.02 command line appears (“The command line that can’t do anything”)
Do:
> ls
(hd0) (hd0,gpt1) (hd0,gpt2)
> set root=(hd0,gpt2)
> linux /boot/vmlinu<TAB> root=/dev/sda2
> initrd /boot/init<TAB>
> boot
-> Whole bunch of console output, then KDE Neon login screen appears.  :)  :)  :)

== Discovering KDE Neon ==

Some things are pretty strange:
– There is an application icon “Install KDE Neon”
– When using apt, dpkg everytime complains about grub-efi-amd64-signed

=== Trying to fix grub... ===

– There is no /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Usually, this contains the grub boot menu entries.
- Like expected, reinstalling grub does not work:

david at doro:~$ sudo grub-install [/dev/sda1]
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
Could not prepare Boot variable: Invalid argument
grub-install: error: efibootmgr failed to register the boot entry: Input/output error.
david at doro:~$ 

– Create grub.cfg:

david at doro:~$ sudo grub-mkconfig --output=/boot/grub/grub.cfg
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/99_breeze-grub.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found theme: /boot/grub/themes/breeze/theme.txt
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-16-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.18.0-16-generic
done

– Now, there is a grub.cfg. Reboot...
-> GNU Grub 2.02 command line still appears. :(
- Do:

> set root=(hd0,gpt2)
> configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
-> Screen turns black (no console output), then KDE Neon login screen appears. (much faster than before.)