Acer Aspire Switch 10 can't boot 14.04 LTS

[claire3]

Brand-new Acer Switch 10, can't get Ubuntu to boot. I've done the following:

* Disabled secure boot
* Added boot EFI for both Bootx64.efi and grubx64.efi to the EFI bootloader settings
* Tried several USB drives on both the microUSB and USB ports on the device

I cannot get the machine to boot anything other than Windows.

[Bucky Ball]

Post moved to own thread.

[yancek]

I'm not familiar with uefi so I doubt I will be able to help with that but, just to clarify, have you installed Ubuntu and are not able to boot it? or are you unable to boot from the installation medium, the flash drive?

[claire3]

I can't boot off the installation flash drive. Tried using Rufus and formatting with GPT for UEFI, no dice.

[yancek]

What software did you use to create the bootable flash drive?
Have your tried booting the flash on another computer to see if it works?
What have you tried formatting, I'm not clear about that?
Do you have an option in the BIOS to disable 'Fastboot' which deals with w8 hibernation?

[claire3]

We have made progress! After successfully booting a GParted LiveUSB (with secure boot turned off, since unlike 64-bit Ubuntu, GParted and even 32-bit Ubuntu kernels are not digitally signed by Microsoft), we were able to dig into things and determine that this device only supports 32-bit UEFI bootloaders. This is a tablet with an Intel Atom CPU, and it ships with 32-bit Windows 8.1 (even though the processor is actually 64-bit). Some other research came up with an article on getting Ubuntu on a somewhat similar device - the ASUS Transformer T100TA, which has the same CPU as this tablet.

Link to article for T100TA and Ubuntu is here: http://www.jfwhome.com/2014/03/07/pe...mer-book-t100/

We were able to install Ubuntu successfully, but it does not boot. Next step is to get boot working. We can get it to boot into Grub by enabling Secure Boot in the Acer UEFI and trusting /HDD1/Ubuntu/bootia32.efi, but so far we have to manually direct Grub to boot using the following:

linux (hd1,gpt2)/boot/vmlinuz-3.13-xxxx root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 video=VGA-1:1366x768e reboot=pci,force
initrd (hd1,gpt2)/boot/initrd-3.13-xxxx
boot

Also worth noting that we may have done something stupid in deleting a small partition between the EFI partition and the Windows 8 installation, which seems to have borked being able to get into the UEFI firmware or bootloader without having a Windows 8 recovery drive attached via USB. So don't do that.

So, 64-bit Ubuntu is working using the 32-bit signed EFI bootloader with Secure Boot enabled. Hooray!

[claire3]

I filed a bug in Launchpad for this.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...2/+bug/1341944

Getting Ubuntu working on an Atom-based tablet is doable, but it's a giant PITA. It requires compiling Grub2, which requires disabling Secure Boot since compiling Grub2 removes the digital signature in the official Ubuntu version that allows keeping Secure Boot enabled.

[Bucky Ball]

? You filed a bug report? If the small partition you deleted was a FAT partition, then you probably deleted the EFI boot partition. That is not a bug.

I just read your bug report. That is not a bug report, it is a suggestion to the devs to include a 32bit EFI bootloader. Very different and doesn't belong in bug reports. They'll get back to you there in due time. Good luck.

[Reggie_Guevara]

Hi Claire,

Good for you

So you were able to boot 14.04LTS 32bit via LiveUSB? Could you walk me through it? I created such a LiveUSB using the 993,280KB iso, vs. the 950,272KB 64bit iso, using Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.5.4, but I still couldn't get it to boot, whether SecureBoot was enabled or not. Either it goes straight to Windows, or if I force a USB boot, I get a system has no usb boot capability.

[claire3]

Hi Claire,

Good for you

So you were able to boot 14.04LTS 32bit via LiveUSB? Could you walk me through it? I created such a LiveUSB using the 993,280KB iso, vs. the 950,272KB 64bit iso, using Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.5.4, but I still couldn't get it to boot, whether SecureBoot was enabled or not. Either it goes straight to Windows, or if I force a USB boot, I get a system has no usb boot capability.

I'm going to have to collect what we did. There is an ia32 Grub package in apt for Ubuntu; it's just not included on the LiveCD (for no justifiable reason). What we ended up doing was using a gparted LiveUSB, which has the 32-bit UEFI Grub binary, to boot into Grub and manually boot into the Ubuntu LiveUSB from there. Once we were in the LiveUSB, we could install Ubuntu on the machine.

After that we had to manually boot into Ubuntu from a Grub command line, and once it was booted up we could compiled 32-bit Grub for UEFI. I think if you just take the 32-bit Grub binary and drop it onto the LiveUSB you should be able to boot, though. We tried using someone else's compiled version and ran into problems because the configuration couldn't find the Linux kernel.

Once I have everything in a coherent format from start to finish I will definitely be writing about it.

? You filed a bug report? If the small partition you deleted was a FAT partition, then you probably deleted the EFI boot partition. That is not a bug.

I just read your bug report. That is not a bug report, it is a suggestion to the devs to include a 32bit EFI bootloader. Very different and doesn't belong in bug reports. They'll get back to you there in due time. Good luck.

I didn't delete the EFI partition. I'm not that stupid. We deleted a partition that the Windows bootloader uses, but once we got Grub working that was no longer an issue.

And for anyone else interested, yes, the inability of Ubuntu to boot on 32-bit UEFI is a bug. It's fixable, it impacts the functionality of the OS and the bootloader, and the only reasons thus far for not fixing have been "because we don't want to" and "because there aren't any 32-bit UEFI machines anymore" (which is completely false).