Linux on Acer V3-112p

It’s an old Windows 8 laptop I’ve had years with a modest 2.16 GHz N2840 processor and the maximum 8 Gb RAM. It’s like Ship of Theseus, having had memory, battery, screen, and hard drive replaced. It is however ridiculously small and light.

UEFI secure boot can be a trial with this laptop, although Ubuntu is OK. Open UEFI (entered with F2) and set reset secure boot settings to factory defaults, then change boot order so USB is first.

Acer V3-112p won’t boot from the USB 3.0 port (blue), use the other one!

Lubuntu

Downloaded Lubuntu 22.04.1 (Jammy Jellyfish) and used Rufus on Windows to create the USB boot media. First boot wasn’t successful (blank screen) so tried again using “Safe graphics”. Installer ran fine and on reboot we’re treated to “No bootable device found”.

Note the official Lubuntu web site is lubuntu.me not lubuntu.net.

Reboot and enter UEFI (F2). Set a supervisor password, which enables the other options. Select “Select an UEFI file as trusted for executing” and navigate through <HDD0>, <EFI>, <ubuntu>, and select shimx64.efi. Finally, F10 to save and exit.

Wi-Fi won’t work out of the box (it’s a Broadcom chipset with a proprietary driver). Connect using Ethernet and sudo apt-get update then run the Additional Drivers. Strangely, this showed “Using Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA wireless driver source…” but “Apply Changes” and “Revert” were unavailable. Running sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source rectified that and generated the MOK needed which was added on next reboot. I’m not sure why this isn’t working from Additional Drivers.

Xubuntu

Xubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) next, following much the same process. Secure boot is enabled and again I needed to choose “Try or install Xubuntu (Safe graphics)”.

Once up and running, Wi-Fi was enabled from “Additional Drivers”.

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